DSIP

DSIP is short for delta sleep inducing peptide. It is a chain of nine amino acids, the small units proteins are built from, and short chains like that are called peptides. Guido Schoenenberger and Marcel Monnier, in Basel, pulled it out of the blood leaving the brains of rabbits in 1977, and named it for what it did to the rabbits' brainwave trace when it was dripped straight into the fluid filled chambers inside the brain. The American regulator's name for it is emideltide. What is sold is injected under the skin in the evening, and the name is the strongest claim anyone has made for it.

There is no established mechanism. Kovalzon and Strekalova's 2006 review says the link between DSIP and sleep has never been further characterised, in part because no DSIP gene, protein or related receptor has been isolated, and calls the sleep factor hypothesis extremely poorly documented and still weak. A 2011 search of mammalian gene and protein databases reported that nothing is known of any precursor protein or encoding gene for it. Every human study of DSIP in blood that I read measures DSIP-like immunoreactivity, meaning whatever the antibody stuck to rather than DSIP itself, and it tracks body temperature, sits lower in REM sleep, the rapid eye movement stage, than in waking, and falls at the moment of falling asleep. The 2006 review proposes that a different, unidentified peptide is at least partly responsible for both.

People take it for sleep, which is what the name promises, usually as a single evening injection 1 to 3 hours before intended sleep. That is the convention that circulates and it is reported here as observation, not as a recommendation. The three uses FDA evaluated it for in 2026 were chronic insomnia, narcolepsy and opioid withdrawal, and the older human record splits along those lines too: sleep laboratory studies in chronic insomniacs, and one series in 107 inpatients in alcohol or opiate withdrawal, every one of them whose route I could establish given into a vein.

Reading the abstract and stopping there. Everyone quoting DSIP safety, including this site until FDA's 2026 document was read, has been quoting the abstract of that 1984 withdrawal series, which records only headaches in a few patients, while the full paper records three serious adverse effects. The abstract is the part that is free. The second mistake is the name. DSIP was named on a rabbit brainwave result from 1977, and when a Moscow group put DSIP and thirteen modified versions back into rabbits by that same route into the brain, DSIP itself did nothing to sleep that a saline injection into the same animals did not do, while two of the modified versions raised slow wave sleep by 10 to 15 percent and a third suppressed it.

The safety record is thin, old, almost entirely by vein, and its largest item is not in the abstracts. Dick and colleagues gave DSIP into a vein to 107 inpatients in alcohol or opiate withdrawal, with no control group and no blinding, and the published abstract says tolerance was good aside from headaches reported by a few patients. FDA's 2026 reviewers read the full paper and report that 95 of the 107 had no significant adverse events, 9 had minor transient effects including perspiration, headache, nausea and vertigo, and 3 had serious adverse effects, two of them low blood pressure at the start of the first injection, with one of those going on to worsening low blood pressure after a second injection. Separately, in a 2009 randomised trial in 24 women having surgery, the 12 who received DSIP had a raised heart rate, lowered heart rate variability and lighter rather than deeper anaesthesia. For the route people actually use, FDA reports no nonclinical or clinical safety data and no effectiveness data at all.