Epitalon: The Evidence Card. Every PubMed Record, Who Wrote It, and What Holds Up

Epitalon is the synthetic tetrapeptide Ala-Glu-Asp-Gly (AEDG), built in St Petersburg from the amino-acid composition of Epithalamin, a crude extract of bovine pineal glands. We read all 256 PubMed records filed under either name, one by one. After removing nine false positives, 165 concern the synthetic peptide. Between 72.7% and 92.7% of them, depending on how a collaborator is defined, carry an author from the originating group or its co-author network; three describe studies in people; no registered trial was located; and one core finding, telomere elongation in cultured human cells, has been partially reproduced by a laboratory with no co-authorship link to the group. This page is the census, the method and the data.

Version 1.0-rc, 17 October 2026. Condor Research Editorial. Last reviewed: 17 October 2026. Counts, identifiers, registry results and regulatory entries were checked against the primary databases on that date; the literal queries are in the method note, and the classified census can be downloaded as dataset.json.

What exactly is Epitalon, and what is it not?

Epitalon is one defined molecule: L-alanyl-L-glutamyl-L-aspartyl-glycine, four residues long, formula C₁₄H₂₂N₄O₉, molecular weight 390.35 g/mol, PubChem CID 219042.³ MeSH files it as a Supplementary Concept, “alanyl-glutamyl-aspartyl-glycine”, with Epitalon, Epithalon, Epithalone, Ala-Glu-Asp-Gly and AE-0 peptide as entry terms.⁴ Epithalamin is something else: a polypeptide extract of bovine pineal glands, which MeSH records separately under CAS 64082-79-7.⁵ The FDA’s 2026 review states the same distinction in plain terms: it treats Epitalon and Epithalamin as different substances.⁶

Identity of the two substances. Sources: PubChem CID 219042 and its computed properties; MeSH records 67421253 and 67027437; FDA briefing document of May 2026 for the acetate salt. All accessed 17 October 2026.

Three naming problems run through the record, and each one changes what a search returns.

• PubChem merges the two. The synonym list of CID 219042 includes “Epithalamin”, “Epithalamine” and CAS 64082-79-7, the number MeSH assigns to the extract.³ A pipeline that pulls synonyms from PubChem, as most automated evidence counters do, will fold 82 Epithalamin-only records into a count for the synthetic peptide.
• The same sequence has three origin stories. Most papers describe it as designed from the amino-acid composition of the pineal extract. The 2002 retinitis pigmentosa paper says it was designed from a retinal extract, Retinalamin, and that the peptides derived from the pineal and retinal extracts are identical.⁷ Five papers from B. I. Kuznik’s group in Chita describe it as derived from posterior pituitary extracts.⁸⁹ The molecule is the same; the narrative around it is not.
• The sequence itself is misprinted. Two abstracts from the originating group give it as Ala-Glu-Asp-Glu.¹⁰¹¹ A 2025 review also found one paper drawing Epitalon with non-standard γ-linked bonds.¹

The confusion has practical consequences beyond bibliometrics. The FDA’s 2026 review lists inconsistent naming as a reason the substance is “not well-characterized”.⁶ And the human mortality data most often attached to “Epitalon” online come from Epithalamin, a different preparation, sometimes given together with a thymus extract. A 2026 paper outside PubMed frames part of this literature as a “translational dosing error” rooted in the same confusion; we do not reproduce quantities here.¹² For the Pinealon comparison, see our page on Pinealon (Glu-Asp-Arg).

How large is the Epitalon literature once the names are untangled?

We ran two PubMed queries on 17 October 2026, one for each substance, using the MeSH Supplementary Concept plus every literature name in title and abstract. The Epitalon query returned 174 records; the Epithalamin query returned 107; together, 256 unique records. We then read every title and abstract and classified each record by substance, model, design, year, authorship group and country.

Census of the two literatures by model. Excluded: 9 false positives (the string “AEDG” or the sub-sequence Ala-Glu-Asp-Gly used for something else, from underwater sensor routing to a plant extract) and 4 records on other pineal extracts (Crinofizin, an unnamed Romanian extract, Pineamin). Full list in dataset.json.

Four features of the Epitalon record stand out. It is old: 101 of 165 records date from 2000 to 2009, with a peak of 20 in 2002, and only 27 appeared from 2020 onwards. It is concentrated: 88 records, 53%, sit in two journals, Bulletin of Experimental Biology and Medicine (54) and Advances in Gerontology (34). It is partly invisible to English readers: 56 records are in Russian, with an English abstract at best. And it is animal-heavy: 80 animal studies against 3 in people, with Drosophila, chickens and rhesus monkeys alongside mice and rats.

How concentrated is the authorship?

This section measures who signed the papers, nothing more. Shared authorship does not show that a result is wrong, and the absence of shared authorship does not show that a study is an experimental replication; that question is handled finding by finding in the next section. The unit is the PubMed record.

Headline definition. The originating core is any record signed by V. Kh. Khavinson, V. N. Anisimov, V. G. Morozov or V. M. Dilman, or by anyone affiliated with the St Petersburg Institute of Bioregulation and Gerontology. Its network is every other author who co-signed at least one core record, in any year: 284 people. A record has “no authorship link” only if none of its authors belongs to either set.

Sensitivity of the authorship-concentration figure to its definition. By affiliation alone: 129 of 165 Epitalon records carry an affiliation field, and 69 of those 129 (53.5%) name the Institute of Bioregulation and Gerontology. By funding: only 3 Epitalon records carry MEDLINE grant data and 30 a generic “research support” tag, too few to classify by funder. Script: 10_sensitivity.py.

Under the headline definition, 120 records (72.7%) come from the core group and 33 (20.0%) from its network without the core. Twelve (7.3%) have no link, and seven of those twelve are reviews, an erratum or a bibliography. The unlinked experimental literature on Epitalon is five records:

Every experimental Epitalon record with no authorship link to the origin group located in PubMed, 17 October 2026. Under the temporal definition (C) four more records qualify; they are listed in dataset.json.

In 26 years, five experimental papers on Epitalon were signed by groups that had never published with its inventors.

Epithalamin looks less concentrated on paper: 24 of 103 records (23%) have no link to the group. That figure needs context. Epithalamin was manufactured in Russia, the 1998 diabetes study names the St Petersburg manufacturer Samson,¹⁸ and a 2005 primate paper calls it a pharmacopoeial drug.¹⁹ Unlinked Epithalamin papers are, almost without exception, Soviet and Russian clinicians and physiologists using an available domestic product. Only one unlinked experimental record comes from a Western laboratory, and it found no effect of the extract on rat pineal androgen receptors.²⁰

We have a separate page on the 2025 Brunel study: Epitalon and telomerase: the replication record. Here we place it in the whole census.

Which findings have been replicated by unlinked laboratories?

Strategy. For each of the seven claims that recur in reviews and marketing, we ran the two census queries combined with the claim’s terms (for example telomer*, hTERT or “alternative lengthening” for telomeres), read every hit with no authorship link, and placed it in one of six categories: direct replication (same model and protocol), conceptual replication (same result in another model or protocol), partial replication (some outcomes reproduced, others not, or report internally inconsistent), conceptual support (a related result), null result, or no information (nothing located). Queries and hits are in dataset.json. The unit is the publication.

Replication status of the recurring claims, PubMed, 17 October 2026. “Null” means the abstract reports no effect on the claim’s main outcome. “No information” means no unlinked study was located, not that none exists.

Telomeres. The founding claim is a 2003 report that Epitalon induced the catalytic subunit of telomerase, telomerase activity and telomere elongation in telomerase-negative human fetal fibroblasts,²¹ followed by a 2004 report that treated fibroblasts went past their division limit, 44 passages against 34.²⁵ The group’s 2019 study in lymphocytes from 11 men is less tidy than its citations suggest: telomere length rose significantly in 5 donors and fell in 2.²² The 2025 Brunel study is the only test by an unlinked laboratory.¹⁶ We read it together with its correction,²⁶ which replaced the images of the three data figures (the published versions lacked axes, scales and some bars); the legends were unchanged and the text was not corrected.

Read against the corrected figures, the result is narrower than the abstract. In the two breast-cancer lines, telomere length rose across a concentration series, with ALT activity rather than telomerase. In the normal fibroblast line, the type of cell used in 2003, the corrected panel marks the change in telomere length against untreated cells as not significant, although the text reports a significant increase. The significant increase appears in Figure 1D, which the legend assigns to the epithelial line but whose axis label names the fibroblast line. For telomerase activity, two different comparisons are mixed. Against the positive-control cancer line, activity in both normal lines is low; but the significance marks in those panels refer to that comparison, and the text reports a fourfold relative increase over untreated fibroblasts, a comparison the corrected panels neither confirm nor refute visually. The rise in hTERT mRNA is marked significant in the fibroblasts and not significant in the epithelial line. The peptide was a gift from a commercial research-peptide supplier, and the paper reports no analytical check of its identity. We classify the study as a partial, internally inconsistent replication in vitro, not as confirmation of the 2003 fibroblast result.

Lifespan. All rodent lifespan studies of Epitalon come from the Anisimov and Khavinson collaboration. We read the full survival tables of four publications covering five mouse cohorts; the two rat publications are available to us only as abstracts.

Rodent lifespan data for Epitalon. Mouse rows from the full survival tables (the 2005 tables checked against the page images of the Russian original); rat rows from abstracts. “Significant” follows each paper’s own test. Maximum lifespan is the single longest-lived animal.

The full texts change the balance in one direction and the details in another. The 2005 paper, which we could not assess from its abstract, states that Epitalon had no statistically significant effect on mean lifespan in either substrain, and in SAMR-1 mice the longest-lived tenth died significantly earlier than saline controls. By cohort, the mean lifespan of the whole group rose significantly in 2 of 5 mouse cohorts (CBA and HER-2/neu) and did not change significantly in 3. Maximum lifespan was higher in 4 of 5, but it is one animal per group: in the CBA study, the 10-month gain rests on a single mouse that outlived every other. The CBA paper also gives two different values for its longest-lived tenth. No lifespan study by a group without a co-authorship link was located in PubMed as of 17 October 2026, in any species.

Melatonin. The pineal claim rests on rhesus monkey studies co-signed by Khavinson,³³ a rat pinealocyte culture³⁴ and two human reports. The one experiment run in a laboratory outside Russia, at a Paris chronobiology laboratory and co-signed by Khavinson and Anisimov, is null on every measure.²⁴ Pineal glands from young (9-week) and old (27-month) male Wistar rats were perifused for nine and a half hours; the tetrapeptide was added to the perifusate at three concentrations, alone and together with the beta-adrenergic agonist isoproterenol. The system worked: old glands secreted less melatonin than young ones, and isoproterenol raised secretion. The tetrapeptide changed neither basal nor stimulated secretion at any concentration or age. Each condition used three chambers of one gland each, so small effects cannot be excluded, and the authors note that in vitro and in vivo conditions, or species, may differ. It is cited far less than the positive monkey work.

Tumours. Epitalon was reported to reduce mammary tumours in HER-2/neu mice³⁵ and colon tumours after a chemical carcinogen,³⁶ among others; it had no inhibitory effect on chemically induced bladder tumours.²³ In the SHR mouse study, total spontaneous tumour incidence did not change.²⁹ The FDA’s 2026 review read the same studies as too limited to inform carcinogenic risk, and flagged telomerase activation itself as a theoretical concern.⁶

What human evidence exists for Epitalon?

Three PubMed records describe synthetic Epitalon given to people, and one further report on the night-shift study sits outside PubMed. The FDA’s 2026 briefing lists three human studies: the 2002 retinitis pigmentosa paper, the English version of the Ivko night-shift paper and the World Heart Journal report, which it counts as two separate studies.⁶ It does not list the 2007 Korkushko paper, in which Epitalon and Epithalamin are reported together. We group the two night-shift reports as one study, because they describe the same numbers of women, groups and protocol; that correspondence is our inference, since the full text supplied to us for the Russian Ivko paper turned out to be a different paper by the same group. We read the other reports in full.

Every human study of synthetic Epitalon located, read in full text where available (17 October 2026). No amounts or administration details are given here. The Ivko and World Heart Journal reports appear to describe the same 75 women, groups and 20-day protocol; we count them as one study, an inferred correspondence pending the Russian full text.

Translated into a level of evidence: two small comparisons described as randomised, with surrogate endpoints, no stated allocation method and no reported blinding, and one comparison against conventional therapy for which randomisation is not reported. None was registered or declared a primary endpoint, and none reports losses. That is hypothesis-generating material. The FDA reached the same conclusion from the other direction: it found no study of Epitalon in people with insomnia, the use it evaluated, and no clinical data on safety.⁶

Epithalamin, the extract, has a larger and older human record: 22 PubMed records from 1977 to 2011, six indexed as randomised controlled trials. These are the source of the mortality figures that circulate online. We read the four central reports in full.

The central Epithalamin mortality reports, read in full text. None was registered, declared a primary endpoint or reported losses to follow-up. All four share the originating group.

The full texts raise a problem that the abstracts hide. The Kiev reports of 2003, 2006 and 2011 all describe Epithalamin given at the Institute of Gerontology in Kiev from 1992, through 1994 in the 2003 report and through 1995 in the later two, and the 2006 and 2011 papers report identical three-year changes in cardiovascular functional age and exercise tolerance. Yet the Epithalamin group is 46, 36 and 39 people, the control is 48, 34 and 40, and the control is placebo, saline and basic therapy alone in turn. Our reading that they overlap is an inference: whether they are one cohort, overlapping subsets or different groups cannot be settled from the papers; they cannot be counted as three independent trials. Across all 22 Epithalamin human records, at least 6 abstracts describe the extract given alongside other agents. None of this transfers to synthetic Epitalon, which has never been tested in a comparable cohort.

Has Epitalon been tested in a registered clinical trial?

No. We queried four registries on 17 October 2026 with 11 terms: Epitalon, Epithalon, Epithalone, Epitalone, AEDG, Ala-Glu-Asp-Gly, alanyl-glutamyl-aspartyl-glycine, Epithalamin, Epithalamine, Epitalamin and “pineal peptide”.

Trial registries, 17 October 2026. The literal queries and raw responses are in the dataset.

Epitalon did once enter a regulatory pathway that could have led to a trial. On 2 September 2010 the FDA granted an orphan designation for “treatment of retinitis pigmentosa” to an Australian sponsor, BioDiem Ltd; the designation is now listed as withdrawn or revoked, and no orphan approval followed.⁴⁸ The FDA’s 2026 briefing dates the withdrawal to 6 January 2016.⁶ No registered study came out of it.

What does this literature allow us to say, and what not?

1. “Epitalon” and “Epithalamin” are not interchangeable, and their evidence cannot be pooled. They have separable literatures (165 and 103 records, 25 shared), different identifiers in MeSH and at the FDA, and very different human records (3 against 22). PubChem’s synonym list merges them, so automated counts inherit the error. Every human mortality figure in this field belongs to the extract.
2. Authorship is highly concentrated. Between 72.7% and 92.7% of Epitalon records, depending on the definition, carry an author from the originating group or its co-author network; the range for primary experiments is 74.8% to 96.4%. Under the headline definition, unlinked experimental work amounts to five records, four of them since 2022. This measures authorship, not the validity of any single result.
3. The core telomere claim has no clean independent replication. The 2025 Brunel study is the only unlinked test. Its corrected figures show telomere elongation in two cancer lines and in a panel labelled inconsistently between the two normal lines, and no significant change in the fibroblast panel, the cell type of the 2003 claim; its uncorrected text reports increases in both normal lines. No unlinked study measuring telomeres in an animal or person given Epitalon was located.
4. The lifespan claim is weaker than its reputation, even inside the group’s own data. In the five mouse cohorts whose survival tables we read, mean lifespan rose significantly in two and did not change significantly in three; in one, the longest-lived tenth died significantly earlier than controls. Gains in maximum lifespan rest on single animals. No unlinked lifespan study was located.
5. The melatonin claim has a negative result that is rarely cited. The only test run in an external laboratory found no effect on basal or stimulated melatonin secretion by isolated rat pineal glands, young or old, although its small size cannot exclude small effects.
6. Human evidence for the synthetic peptide is hypothesis-generating, not more. Two small comparisons described as randomised and one comparison for which randomisation is not reported, none registered, none with a declared primary endpoint, a stated allocation method or reported blinding, all with surrogate endpoints and no published safety data, which is also the FDA’s reading.
7. The Epithalamin mortality data are weaker than their abstracts. Three Kiev reports of treatment started in 1992 give different group sizes and different controls, two report identical intermediate results, and one reproduces a melatonin table that another paper presents for a different population. They cannot be treated as independent trials.
8. The MeSH “Humans” tag overstates human evidence about 18-fold here. 54 of 165 records carry it; 3 are studies in people. Any tool that counts the tag as human evidence is counting cell cultures.
9. There is no toxicology package. The FDA found no pharmacokinetic, acute, repeat-dose, reproductive or two-year carcinogenicity studies, and no clinical study of immunogenicity.⁶

What is Epitalon’s legal and regulatory status?

Legality attaches to what a substance is used for and where, not to the molecule. For Europe, the verified facts are these: no authorisation of Epitalon as a medicine was located in the Union Register or reported for the member states the FDA checked, no EU clinical trial was located, and no Novel Food entry or authorisation was located. Presenting or supplying it for human use brings it within the definition of a medicinal product, a regime it has never satisfied; how member states classify and enforce the supply of such substances differs.

Regulatory status of Epitalon by jurisdiction. “Not named” on the WADA list is not the same as permitted; the S0 reading is ours, from WADA’s wording, not a WADA statement about Epitalon.

Three points need care. First, the FDA advisory vote is a recommendation, not a decision, and its exact tally is not yet on the official record; the agency’s own reviewers had concluded that the evidence weighed against listing, citing poor characterisation, possible immunogenicity and the absence of efficacy and safety data.⁶ Second, national enforcement differs across EU member states even though the definition of a medicinal product is common; possession or import for human use can carry penalties in some countries and not in others. Third, products sold as Epitalon are not always what the label says: the 2015 Belgian analysis identified it in two illegal pharmaceutical preparations,¹³ and the FDA notes that different salts are sold under the same common name.⁶

What is still unknown about Epitalon?

• Pharmacokinetics. No study in any species reports absorption, half-life, distribution or clearance; the FDA found none.⁶ For a four-residue peptide made of common amino acids, how much survives intact in blood is an open question, not a detail.
• A lifespan test by an unlinked laboratory. None was located in PubMed as of 17 October 2026, in any organism.
• A melatonin test by an unlinked laboratory. None was located; the only external-laboratory experiment, with origin co-authors, was null; the positive primate and human data come from the group.
• Mechanism. DNA- and histone-binding models are computational or cell-free, from the originating group. No biochemical test by an unlinked laboratory was located.
• Telomeres in vivo. No study measuring telomere length in animals or people given Epitalon by an unlinked laboratory was located.
• Carcinogenic potential. Telomerase activation and ALT induction in cancer lines raise a question that existing rodent tumour studies, short and from one group, were not designed to answer.⁶¹⁶
• Whether AEDG occurs naturally. A 2017 mass-spectrometry paper from the group reports AEDG in the pineal polypeptide complex;⁵⁹ no reproduction by another laboratory was located.
• The human cohorts. Whether the 12- and 15-year Epithalamin cohorts are one population, and how allocation was done, cannot be settled from abstracts.

Method note

Synonyms first. We took synonyms from PubChem CID 219042 and from the MeSH Supplementary Concept records, and kept PubChem’s merged Epithalamin synonyms as a separate query rather than folding them in.³⁴⁵ Database codes and vendor catalogue numbers were not used as search terms.

PubMed queries, run 17 October 2026 through NCBI E-utilities.

• Epitalon: ("alanyl-glutamyl-aspartyl-glycine"[nm] OR epitalon[tiab] OR epithalon[tiab] OR epithalone[tiab] OR epitalone[tiab] OR "Ala-Glu-Asp-Gly"[tiab] OR AEDG[tiab] OR "alanyl-glutamyl-aspartyl-glycine"[tiab]): 174 records.
• Epithalamin: ("epithalamin"[nm] OR epithalamin*[tiab] OR epitalamin*[tiab] OR "pineal peptide preparation"[tiab] OR "pineal polypeptide extract"[tiab]): 107 records.
• Union: 256 records. For comparability with the Evidence Index we also ran its own name query with the corrected publication-type filter: 174 records, 58 tagged “Humans”, 1 tagged as a clinical trial.

Classification. One reader classified every record from its title and abstract, and from MeSH and publication types when there was no abstract (23 records). Substance: Epitalon, Epithalamin, both, another pineal extract, or false positive. Model: in vitro or ex vivo (cells, tissues, isolated organs, enzymes, including human cells), animal in vivo, human in vivo (the substance given to, or tested in, people), review, chemistry or analytical, in silico, other. One record first read as in vitro was reclassified as a human study after the FDA’s description of its English version showed a placebo-controlled design.

Full texts. Fourteen full texts were read: the three human studies of Epitalon and the World Heart Journal report, four Epithalamin human reports, four mouse lifespan publications, the 2003 melatonin experiment, and the 2025 Brunel study with its correction. The 2002 retinitis pigmentosa paper and the 2005 Russian lifespan paper were read from OCR text, and every number used from them was checked against the page images of the original. The file supplied for the Russian night-shift study turned out to be a different paper by the same group (an in vitro study, PMID 33342107), so that study’s design comes from the World Heart Journal report and the FDA briefing. The two rat lifespan publications were not available in full. Full texts are cited, not redistributed; short quotations only.

Blind double coding. A random sample of 40 records (15% of 256, rounded up to the minimum of 40; seed 20261017) was classified a second time by an independent coder, a separate model instance given only titles, abstracts, publication types and MeSH headings, with no access to the first coder’s labels. Agreement on model was 100% (Cohen’s kappa 1.00); on substance, 87.5% (kappa 0.78). The five substance disagreements concern records where the abstract does not name the preparation (two older papers on unnamed “pineal peptides” that PubMed indexes under the Epithalamin concept), one record that discusses both substances, and one sequence-motif analysis. First-coder labels were kept, with reasons, in doublecode/agreement.json.

Replication search. For each recurring claim, the census queries were combined with the claim’s terms and every unlinked hit was read and assigned a category (direct replication, conceptual replication, partial replication, conceptual support, null result, no information). Script: 12_replication_search.py; terms and hits in dataset.json.

Authorship concentration. Headline definition: origin core = any author normalised to Khavinson V, Anisimov V, Morozov V or Dilman V, or any affiliation to the Institute of Bioregulation and Gerontology; network = all co-authors of core records (284 names after normalising transliterations). Four alternative definitions (names only; temporal network; strict network; core only), an affiliation-only reading and a funding check are reported in the sensitivity table. Country is taken from the affiliation field; for 83 older records without one, it is inferred from the language of the article and flagged as inferred.

Registries and regulators. ClinicalTrials.gov API v2, ISRCTN API and the CTIS public search API were queried by script; the EU Clinical Trials Register was searched through its web interface. Regulatory entries were read on the official pages listed in the table and the references.

Limitations. One coder classified all records and a second coder checked a 40-record sample; borderline cases are flagged in the note field. Abstracts, not full texts, were the basis, and 56 Epitalon records are in Russian. Authorship rules can over-count dependence when common surnames collide and under-count it when a collaborator never co-signed with the core; the sensitivity table brackets this. PubMed is not exhaustive: Russian-language journals outside MEDLINE, such as the World Heart Journal paper above, are missed. “Null” marks only what an abstract states. Every negative statement on this page means “not located in the sources named, on 17 October 2026”.

Comparison with the earlier automated count. Condor’s Research Compound Evidence Index (22 September 2026, unpublished) recorded for Epitalon: 173 records, 57 tagged “Humans”, 0 trials in PubMed, 0 on ClinicalTrials.gov, confidence medium. Its trial filter used a publication-type syntax that PubMed now returns as zero for every compound; with the corrected syntax the same name query returns 1. The census replaces that row.

Evolution of the Epitalon row of the Evidence Index. Script: 05_index_row.py.

Data and code. dataset.json contains every record with its classification and full author list, a data dictionary, the queries, registry responses, the sensitivity analysis, the double-coding results, the replication ledger with search terms, the human-study tables and the regulatory table. The scripts that reproduce every number and figure (01_fetch_pubmed.py to 12_replication_search.py) are published with it. Licence: CC BY 4.0.

How to cite. Condor Research Editorial. Epitalon Evidence Card: a census of the Epitalon and Epithalamin literature. Version 1.0-rc, 17 October 2026. https://condorresearch.com/research/what-is-epitalon/. Dataset: dataset.json, CC BY 4.0.

Changelog. Version 1.0-rc2 (18 October 2026): RUO review wording changes. Version 1.0-rc (17 October 2026): Key findings box added; FDA listing of human studies described exactly; Brunel telomerase comparisons separated and Figure 1D labelling noted; Kiev and Ivko/World Heart Journal correspondences marked as inferred; Kiev treatment years corrected (1992 to 1994 in the 2003 report); residual treatment-frequency wording removed from the Epithalamin table; “not randomised” replaced by “randomisation not reported”. Version 0.95 (17 October 2026): 14 full texts read. Human-study tables rebuilt from full text (design, arms, allocation, blinding, duration, losses, endpoints, interests); Ivko 2020 and the World Heart Journal 2021 report merged as one cohort; third origin story for the sequence (retinal extract) added. Lifespan rebuilt by cohort with survival tables: the 2005 paper moves from “not assessable” to “no significant change in mean lifespan” in two cohorts, with shorter survival of the longest-lived tenth in SAMR-1; the CBA maximum rests on one animal. Melatonin null described in detail. Brunel 2025 reclassified from conceptual to partial, internally inconsistent replication after reading the corrected figures. New conclusion on the Kiev Epithalamin reports. Version 0.9 (17 October 2026): first public version of the census; authorship concentration with sensitivity analysis; replication categories; blind double coding of a 40-record sample; correction to the 2025 Brunel study read and described; FDA advisory tally stated as reported, pending minutes.

Laboratory supply of the reference material is described on the product pages for Epitalon (vial) and Epitalon capsules; related compounds from the same programme are mapped in the Khavinson bioregulators catalogue.

References

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Epitalon is discussed on this page as a laboratory reference compound for research use only (RUO): not for human or veterinary use, not for diagnostic or therapeutic application, and not for any food or cosmetic purpose. The human studies described here are summarised as published literature. Nothing on this page describes, recommends or implies human use, and no part of it should be read as a claim that Epitalon improves lifespan, sleep, vision or any other function in people.