Tesamorelin Dosage Calculator

Two worked examples, 2 mg versus 1.4 mg

Two real FDA label doses circulate for tesamorelin because there are three approved formulations, and these are two of the three. Both examples below use a 10 mg vial in 2 mL of water, which is 5 mg/mL (5000 mcg/mL), on a 0.5 mL syringe.

Tesamorelin dosage in units depends on your mix: with a 10 mg vial in 2 mL of BAC water (5 mg/mL), 2 mg is 40 units and 1.4 mg is 28 units. The table runs the same math for tesamorelin (often shortened to tesa) in 2 mg and 10 mg vials, on a U-100 insulin syringe where 1 unit is 0.01 mL. The 2 mg and 1.4 mg columns are the original Egrifta and Egrifta SV FDA label figures, used only to show the arithmetic. The last four rows add 5 mg and 20 mg vials, for anyone asking how much BAC water to use for tesamorelin 5mg or 20 mg vials.

Disclaimer: the two examples and the table are unit conversions on FDA label figures for two branded products, used only to show the arithmetic. They are not a recommendation or a dose for you, and dose decisions belong with a licensed prescriber.

Neither number is more correct than the other. They are two different FDA approved products. Enter your own vial size, water volume, and target dose above to run the same math on your numbers.

Sources: openFDA. EGRIFTA (tesamorelin) structured product labels

What this calculator does, and what it will not do

A reconstitution calculator answers a mechanical question. You have a vial of freeze dried peptide. You add a known volume of water. That fixes a concentration.

From there, any dose you name has exactly one correct draw volume, and the calculator finds it. There is no judgment in that step, only division.

What it will not do is choose the dose. That is the line, and it is a hard one. A tool that reads your weight or your goals and hands back "inject this much" is giving medical advice, and we do not do that here, disclaimer or not. If you were looking for a tesamorelin dosage calculator for male or female users, there is no such setting and no weight field, because vial size, water volume, dose and syringe units are the same arithmetic for anyone, and the dose itself is a prescriber decision.

So the target dose is something you bring to the calculator, not something it gives you. If you do not have a number from a prescriber or a protocol you trust, the honest answer is that you are not ready to be measuring a draw yet, and no calculator changes that. For a compound other than tesamorelin, the general peptide calculator runs the same vial-to-syringe math. On the closely related releaser sermorelin, our sermorelin side effects guide reports what its own trials found. A separate sermorelin dosage calculator does the unit math for 1, 2, 5 and 10 mg sermorelin vials.

How to reconstitute a tesamorelin vial

Tesamorelin ships as a lyophilized powder, the same freeze dried form as most research peptides. You reconstitute it by adding water to the sealed vial, swirling gently until it dissolves, and drawing doses from the resulting solution. The steps that follow are general handling practice, not compound specific medical instructions.

1. Wipe both rubber stoppers, the peptide vial and the water vial, with an alcohol swab and let them dry.
2. Draw the water volume the calculator gave you into a syringe.
3. Insert the needle at a slight angle so the water runs down the inside wall of the vial rather than blasting straight onto the powder. This limits foaming.
4. Inject slowly. Do not shake. Swirl gently until the solution is clear.
5. Label the vial with the date and the concentration in mg/mL.
6. Store per the handling notes below.

One point that trips people up: the diluent and the shelf life depend on which tesamorelin you have, and there is real disagreement in the community that the labels actually settle. The FDA approved product exists in three forms, and they are not handled the same way.

The original Egrifta and Egrifta SV labels tell you to reconstitute with sterile water, use the dose immediately, and discard anything unused, and they say not to refrigerate the solution once mixed. The newer Egrifta WR label is the outlier: it uses bacteriostatic water and allows the reconstituted solution to sit at room temperature and be used for up to 7 days. Research grade tesamorelin does not come with a label, so most people follow general peptide practice, bacteriostatic water and refrigeration, but be aware that is convention rather than a stability figure anyone has published for it.

You will see claims online that reconstituted tesamorelin degrades in hours or is unusually fragile. No FDA label says that. The labels say use it promptly for two of the three forms, and give a 7 day window for the third. Treat the degrades in hours line as folklore, not fact, and go by your supplier's written instruction.

For the mixing and measuring steps in plain terms, see the beginner injection guide, and for the sterile versus bacteriostatic water distinction, see the BAC water vs sterile water FAQ.

Egrifta WR and most research grade vials are mixed with bacteriostatic water, a preserved diluent whose multi-dose vial is built for repeated entry. Our supply partner Peptara Labs sells bacteriostatic water in 3, 5 and 10 mL bottles.

Sources: DailyMed. EGRIFTA SV (tesamorelin for injection) prescribing information; openFDA. EGRIFTA (tesamorelin) structured product labels

Picking the BAC water volume

The amount of water you add does not change how much peptide is in the vial. It only changes the concentration, and therefore how much liquid you draw for a given dose. A 10 mg vial reconstituted with 1 mL is twice as concentrated as the same vial with 2 mL, so the draw is half the volume for the same dose. Neither is more or less peptide, and neither lasts more or fewer weeks.

The only practical trade is readability on the syringe. Draws landing at only 2 or 3 units are hard to read, and a larger water volume spreads the marks out. Draws near the top of the barrel point the other way, toward a smaller water volume. The calculator above recomputes instantly, so you can compare volumes and pick the one that reads cleanly.

Reading the insulin syringe

Almost everyone measures reconstituted peptides on a U-100 insulin syringe. The conversion is fixed:

A result of 0.5 mL is 50 units. A result of 0.25 mL is 25 units. The calculator above does this conversion for you and shows both, because reading "draw to the 50 unit mark" is far less error prone than eyeballing half of a millilitre. Smaller barrels, 0.3 mL and 0.5 mL, have finer graduations and are easier to read for small draws.

What the research and the FDA label actually say

This is context, not a protocol. It describes what regulators approved and what the trials measured. It is not a recommendation for you, and none of these figures should be read as a target.

Tesamorelin was approved by the FDA in 2010 under the brand name Egrifta. The approved indication, in the label's own words, is the reduction of excess abdominal fat in HIV infected patients with lipodystrophy. The label says "abdominal fat," not "visceral fat." Visceral adipose tissue was the endpoint the trials measured on CT imaging, but the approved indication text is broader than that one word.

On dose, the label figure depends on the formulation, and this matters because two different real numbers circulate for a reason. The original 2010 Egrifta label reads, verbatim, that the recommended dose is 2 mg injected subcutaneously once a day. The FDA label doses for the three products are:

Egrifta (2010): 2 mg once daily; Egrifta SV (2019 reformulation): 1.4 mg once daily; Egrifta WR (2025): 1.28 mg once daily

Disclaimer: all three are real FDA label doses for different products, quoted as published facts, not a recommendation for you. When you see 2 mg and 1.4 mg both attached to tesamorelin, that is not a mistake, it is two formulations.

On what the trials showed, the pivotal Phase 3 study (Falutz and colleagues, New England Journal of Medicine, 2007) randomized 412 HIV patients with abdominal fat accumulation to tesamorelin 2 mg daily or placebo for 26 weeks. Visceral adipose tissue fell by 15.2 percent in the tesamorelin group and rose by 5.0 percent on placebo, a difference that was highly statistically significant.

A later randomized trial (Stanley and colleagues, JAMA, 2014) reported the visceral fat change as an absolute area, a treatment effect of roughly 42 square centimetres against placebo, and its authors described it as a preliminary study. A 2019 trial (Stanley and colleagues, The Lancet HIV) looked at liver fat specifically and found a 37 percent relative reduction in hepatic fat fraction versus placebo. Across these trials, visceral fat around the organs drops meaningfully over roughly half a year, measured in a specific HIV population. What none of them gives you is a personal dose, which is why the calculator will not either.

Sources: openFDA Drugs@FDA. EGRIFTA (tesamorelin), BLA 022505, original approval 10 November 2010; DailyMed. EGRIFTA SV (tesamorelin for injection) prescribing information; openFDA. EGRIFTA (tesamorelin) structured product labels; PubMed 18057338; PubMed 25038357; PubMed 31611038

Tesamorelin safety notes from the FDA label

Tesamorelin is a prescription drug with a full FDA safety section. The EGRIFTA SV label lists joint pain (arthralgia), injection site redness and itching, pain in the arms or legs, swelling (peripheral edema) and muscle pain (myalgia) among reactions above 5 percent. It warns on neoplasms, elevated IGF-1, fluid retention, glucose intolerance or diabetes, and hypersensitivity, and it says patients with active malignancy should not be treated. These are label facts, not a safety verdict for research grade vials, so raise any symptom with a clinician.

Sources: DailyMed. EGRIFTA SV (tesamorelin for injection) prescribing information

Tesamorelin in Vietnam

Branded Egrifta is not distributed in Vietnam. You will not find it at Long Châu, Pharmacity, Vinmec, or FV Hospital. What circulates here is research grade tesamorelin through cold chain importers, commonly in 10 mg vials priced around 2 to 3.5 million VND.

That is the sourcing reality behind why a reconstitution calculator is the practical tool for this compound locally: you are almost always starting from a bare research vial, not a prefilled pen, so the concentration math is on you. For the full picture on the compound, its mechanism, and what the profile covers, read the tesamorelin guide. Dose and schedule are a prescriber's decision. And if you are comparing the two growth hormone secretagogues, the sermorelin before and after guide lays out what the human trials of the shorter acting fragment actually measured over weeks and months.

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