Dihexa skepticism — someone convince me it's not a nothing burger
11 posts
I've read the Harding paper. I've read the dendritic spine claims. I've read the "7 orders of magnitude more potent than BDNF" marketing.
Here's the problem: virtually all the evidence is preclinical (rodent, cell culture). The proposed oral dose (a few mg/day) is based on... what exactly? No human PK. No human efficacy trial. No human safety trial. And yet people are taking it daily.
I ran it 8 weeks at 8mg/day from what I considered a reputable source. Felt nothing. Reading no different. Work output no different.
Tell me what I'm missing. Ideally with something better than "I felt smarter."
11 Replies
115 posts
You're not missing anything. The evidence base is thin. The extrapolation from BDNF potency in a dish to oral human efficacy is enormous. Anyone claiming strong effects should be treated as n=1 until replicated.
18 posts
I ran it 12 weeks at 10mg. Felt nothing acutely. Noticed... maybe... a slight increase in verbal fluency? I don't trust my own subjective report here. I wouldn't pay for it again.
16 posts
The "7 orders of magnitude more potent than BDNF" claim is in vitro on a specific measure and is basically a cursed statistic that refuses to die. It means very little for oral dosing in humans.
23 posts
Cerebrolysin user who has tried dihexa. Felt nothing from dihexa. The two shouldn't be mentioned in the same sentence — Cerebrolysin has real human data, dihexa has rodent data and marketing.
71 posts
There isn't one. There's a patent-era animal body of work and then a gap. That gap is where the marketing lives.
34 posts
I would like someone to name a single peer-reviewed human study on oral dihexa. I've looked. I haven't found one.
58 posts
I'll steelman: some cog-noots have almost no acute signature but do structural things over months. Could dihexa be one of those? Maybe. But you can't distinguish "real slow effect" from "nothing" without a better study than "I took it and felt smarter."
- Epithalon · 10 mg · 10d on / 80d off · sub-Q
- MOTS-c · 5 mg · 2x/wk · sub-Q
- 5-Amino-1MQ · 150 mg · daily · oral
41 posts
I'll go further: I'd rather spend dihexa-money on a year of Semax, which at least has acute-effect literature and cheap intranasal sourcing.
- Semax · 600 mcg · AM intranasal · intranasal
- Selank · 250 mcg · as needed · intranasal
11 posts
Consensus in this thread matches my read. I'll keep my eyes open for an actual human trial and until then consider this a "not worth it."
31 posts
Same n=1. 12 weeks at 8mg, nothing to write home about. Cost per month higher than Semax + Selank combined. Bad value for money regardless of mechanism.
- BPC-157 · 500 mcg · 2x/day local to knee · sub-Q
- TB-500 · 5 mg · weekly loading · sub-Q
15 posts
The meta-lesson here: when a peptide has a compelling rodent story but zero human trials, the default assumption should be 'nothing' until proven otherwise, not 'maybe'.