Comment · Thu, December 26, 2019
NMN - Worth the money?
Original post in this thread
hwtu · 15 points
Hello, is taking NMN worth the money?
What they were answering
askingforafakefriend · 1 points
I am not sure about a couple of points here.
\> Chromadex owns the patent for NR, and licenses it to TruNiagen and Elysium.
Chromadex is in a bitter patent, contract, and "other" legal dispute with Elysium who is most definetly not licensed to use the patents. Chromadex use to supply NR to Elysium but clearly for some reason things went south. Elysium no longer sells TruNiagen NR.
\> The research I have seen shows that NR raises liver NAD+, but not systemically.
I may be missing something but the studies I have seen do not seem to limit NAD+ elevation to the liver at all.
Here is one in nature that shows NAD+ levels looking at "Whole blood levels of NAD+" - see Fig. 3.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-46120-z
Here is another study looking at NAD+ in "peripheral blood mononuclear cells" - see Fig. 2.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03421-7
All point to significant elevation of NAD+ systematically I think.
u/MisterYouAreSoDumb
Chromadex is in a bitter patent, contract, and "other" legal dispute with Elysium who is most definetly not licensed to use the patents. Chromadex use to supply NR to Elysium but clearly for some reason things went south. Elysium no longer sells TruNiagen NR
That's because Elysium stopped using Chromadex. They were licensing it before it happened. That's the crux of the legal dispute. I suppose I should say "licenses to TruNiagen and licensed to Elysium." The fall out was only recent. Before that happened, they were all pushing NR together on Chromadex's behalf.
Here is one in nature that shows NAD+ levels looking at "Whole blood levels of NAD+" - see Fig. 3.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-46120-z
Ohh, that was publish 6 months ago. I had not seen that one yet! The authors work for Chromadex, though. Not that it makes the data automatically flawed, but still. Something I just saw referenced in that study is a bit concerning. It says nicotinamide riboside can inhibit sirtuins and reduce lifespan at higher doses.
http://www.jbc.org/content/277/47/45099.short
So that's something that should be looked into more.
That second study you linked looked at circulating peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs), because of the limitations of detecting it in blood and urine. They did not detect NR in PBMCs. However, they did detect increases in NAD+. So while NR supplementation might not be raising levels in the blood, it seems to be raising the downstream NAD+ levels. This could be from the liver, though. They still did not detect NR in the blood.
Consistent with the only other report of NR ingestion in humans, we were unable to detect NR concentrations in PBMCs during either treatment condition, despite using optimized recovery methods.
Maybe we don't care about increasing NR systemically, though. Perhaps the increase in NAD+ is all that matters. However, the below study found that NMN supplementation increases both NMN and NAD+ in various tissues.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5668137/
So perhaps my wording is a bit too strong. I see more evidence for NMN being beneficial in humans than I do NR. However, it does appear NR has some favorable improvements in certain people. This looks to be mainly improvements in vascular dysfunction, oxidative stress, and inflammation in muscles. Chromadex's own published study didn't find any correlation to age and lowering of NAD+ levels, though. So their own study kind of showed that NR did not positively affect age-related decline. Pair that with the study I linked about sirtuins declining, and perhaps we are looking at NAD+ and longevity a bit incorrectly.