Brain
Does it improve sleep?
Sleep gets claimed constantly and measured rarely. Where a trial used polysomnography rather than a questionnaire, that is worth a great deal more.
168
people in trials
4
human studies
0
compounds, animal or cell only
0
trials found nothing
Measured in people
Ranked by how many people, which is a fact about the evidence and not a judgement about the compound. The one at the top is the most studied, which is not the same as the best. Counts are never added across compounds, because the same person can appear in more than one trial.
- 168 people2 human studies
First Light (168 participants, 1 mg or 2 mg twice daily or placebo, 3:3:2) and Radiant Light (105 participants, 2 mg twice daily or placebo, 2:1), both 12 weeks, ages 16 to 70. Maintenance of Wakefulness Test sleep latency rose 14.3 to 19.8 minutes with oveporexton against minus 0.4 to minus 0.8 minutes on placebo; Epworth Sleepiness Scale fell 9.7 to 11.8 against 1.5 to 1.7 points; weekly cataplexy fell 79.0 to 88.8 percent against 27.7 to 39.1 percent (all adjusted P below 0.001). Adverse events in 86 to 89 percent against 43 to 54 percent. Funded by Takeda Development Center Americas.
New England Journal of Medicine, 2026 · 168 people
Phase 2, 8 weeks, 112 randomised: 90 to four oveporexton regimens (0.5 mg twice daily, 2 mg twice daily, 2 mg then 5 mg, 7 mg once daily) and 22 to placebo. Sleep latency changes of 12.5, 23.5, 25.4 and 15.0 minutes against minus 1.2 on placebo. Insomnia in 48 percent, urinary urgency 33 percent, urinary frequency 32 percent, with no hepatotoxic effects reported. Funded by Takeda.
New England Journal of Medicine, 2025 · no headcount in the line
- no headcount stated1 human study
Two phase 3 trials in moderate-to-severe OSA with obesity: apnea-hypopnea index fell by about 25 events per hour at 52 weeks versus placebo, supporting the Zepbound sleep apnea indication.
New England Journal of Medicine, 2024 · no headcount in the line
- no headcount stated1 human study
Crossover study in young and older adults: high-dose MK-677 increased stage IV sleep by about 50% and REM sleep by more than 20% in young subjects.
Neuroendocrinology, 1997 · no headcount in the line
What people using these actually report
Uncontrolled self-reports, gathered from clinic write-ups, regulatory complaint records and public forums, and reproduced here as written. They are the best guide on this page to what people actually do, what they expect, and what goes wrong, and they cannot show that anything works, because nobody was measured against a placebo and the people who saw no effect mostly stopped posting. Both halves of that are true at once. The negative reports are kept in for the same reason.
- The negatives in that same corpus are of the same kind rather than systemic: sleep disturbance 6, insomnia 5, sleepiness 3, anxiety 3, waking too early 2, low mood 1. People who react badly tend to react in the sleep and mood direction.
Sources: LongeCity 'Telomeres' forum threads on Epitalon and Epithalon; the Age Reversal Forum self-experimentation thread on Epitalon (AEDG); SelfAssay's aggregated community corpus for Epitalon (258 reports, 236 contributors); vendor price tracking at peppers.market (73 vendors, retrieved August 2026). Reddit's r/Peptides is the most cited venue for this compound but was not directly readable when this section was compiled, so nothing here is drawn from it.
Why the trial record looks like this
A missing trial is usually a missing sponsor. Nobody runs a nine-figure programme on a molecule they cannot own, so the compounds with the thinnest human records are often the oldest and most freely available ones rather than the weakest. Taking Oveporexton as the example, because it states the problem most clearly:
The record is compact because the development path was fast: an orphan disease, a mechanism that directly addresses the known cause, and a sponsor that had already run one OX2R agonist (TAK-994) far enough to find liver toxicity and stop it. Everything published on oveporexton is Takeda funded, from the phase 2 to the phase 3 to the regulatory science paper that derived the attention threshold, which is normal for a new drug and worth saying. The approval arrived less than a month before the phase 3 paper, so for several weeks the only approval record was the sponsor's announcement; Drugs@FDA now carries the application (NDA 220860, approved 5 August 2026) and the label, and this profile is built from those.
The honest tension in this compound is efficacy against tolerability. The wakefulness effect is large by the standards of the field. So is the side effect burden: most treated people get insomnia at the start and most get urinary frequency, and the label's own statement that 17 percent of insomnia was still present at week 12 is the number to watch. Whether people stay on it for years, and what a small creatine phosphokinase signal means over that time, are open questions that no current trial answers. The label also lists the controlled substance schedule as pending, a reminder that a drug which produces wakefulness on demand will be assessed for abuse potential.
A compound appears here only when a citation on its own page states this outcome and reports a result for it; naming it is not enough. Human, animal and cell work are counted separately and never merged. Participant counts are read from the study lines and deliberately undercount. Nothing here is advice, and nothing here is a recommendation to take or to avoid anything.