I for one believe that NR has been hyped to sell a very expensive supplement to the public when a very cheap one will do the job. It's not clear to me that NR is actually better than nicotinamide for doing what we want--which is to get rid of dysfunctional mitochondria. This appears to require that the ratio of NAD+/NADH be increased to get the cell's quality control machinery into motion, not just the absolute level of NAD+. This paper gives some insight--
Capsule
Background: Nicotinamide treatment decreases mitochondrial content and helps cells maintain high mitochondrial quality.
Results: Metabolically enhanced NAD+/NADH ratio and chemically induced SIRT1 activation similarly decreased mitochondrial content, increased autophagy, and induced mitochondrial fragmentation.
Conclusion: Mitochondrial content is modulated by high NAD+/NADH ratio and mechanisms that involve SIRT1 activation.
Significance: Elevation of NAD+/NADH ratio may promote cellular health by facilitating mitochondrial autophagy.
http://www.jbc.org/c...7/23/19304.long
Nicotinamide increases NAD+ and increases the ratio very nicely. NR also raises NAD+, perhaps more than nicotinamide, but I haven't seen anything to date that mentions the ratio. It's also not clear how much you will have to take of NR, but it will definitely be a good deal more than the marketing suggests if you want to achieve the 2.7 fold increase in NAD+ that the primary researcher of this product speaks of--
Nicotinamide riboside (NR) is in wide use as an NAD+ precursor vitamin. Here we determine the time and dose-dependent effects of NR on blood NAD+ metabolism in humans. We report that human blood NAD+ can rise as much as 2.7-fold with a single oral dose of NR in a pilot study of one individual, and that oral NR elevates mouse hepatic NAD+ with distinct and superior pharmacokinetics to those of nicotinic acid and nicotinamide. We further show that single doses of 100, 300 and 1,000 mg of NR produce dose-dependent increases in the blood NAD+ metabolome in the first clinical trial of NR pharmacokinetics in humans. We also report that nicotinic acid adenine dinucleotide (NAAD), which was not thought to be en route for the conversion of NR to NAD+, is formed from NR and discover that the rise in NAAD is a highly sensitive biomarker of effective NAD+ repletion.
https://www.ncbi.nlm...pubmed/27721479
Presumably the 2.7 fold increase is associated with the gram dose (or higher) of the researcher himself (thus an n=1), and the rise of NAAD is a concern, as it's not known what this might do to the process, especially as it was increased by a factor of 45. The surprisingly preliminary state of the NR research is evident in the following story published just days ago--
The new research, reported Oct. 10 in the journal Nature Communications, was led by Charles Brenner... Brenner is ... co-founder and Chief Scientific Adviser of ProHealthspan, which sells NR supplements under the trade name Tru NIAGEN®.
The human trial involved six men and six women, all healthy. Each participant received single oral doses of 100 mg, 300 mg, or 1,000 mg of NR in a different sequence with a seven-day gap between doses. After each dose, blood and urine samples were collected and analyzed by Brenner's lab to measure various NAD+ metabolites in a process called metabolomics. The trial showed that the NR vitamin increased NAD+ metabolism by amounts directly related to the dose, and there were no serious side effects with any of the doses...Prior to the formal clinical trial, Brenner conducted a pilot human study -- on himself.
https://www.scienced...61010135418.htm
Note the strong conflict of interest. My own experience with NR and nicotinamide suggests that nicotinamide works very well when taken at a dose of a gram three or four times a day (which I don't do every day, but only intermittently) and adding 100 mg NR to each gram dose didn't seem to make it better. Nor was 500 mg NR by itself as good, though at the gram level it might have been as good or better. I can't say as I didn't try that dosage, and there wouldn't have been any point as I didn't see any reason to take a very expensive supplement over a very cheap supplement if I have to use the same dose.
Still, a direct NAD+ injection (if that's what it is) sounds very interesting. That it's called a "cocktail" suggests that it's not NAD+ at all, but some mix of precursors.
Edited by Turnbuckle, 27 October 2016 - 11:36 AM.