Pregnenolone is a steroid the body makes from cholesterol; making it is the first step in building every other steroid hormone. It is made in the adrenal glands, the gonads and the brain. In the US it is sold as a dietary supplement, and it has been studied in small trials for pain and schizophrenia.
Pregnenolone has no FDA-approved product and no intake value or upper limit. A trial in veterans with low back pain used 100 mg a day for 1 week, 300 mg for 1 week and 500 mg for 2 weeks (Naylor, 2020). These are study protocols, not a recommendation.
Pregnenolone is sold in the US as a dietary supplement. FDA does not approve dietary supplements before they are marketed; the maker, not FDA, is responsible for safety and labeling.
Human trials are small and short. In a 4-week trial in 94 veterans with chronic low back pain (Naylor, JAMA Network Open, 2020), pain scores improved more on pregnenolone than on placebo, and it was well tolerated. In an 8-week trial in 120 people with schizophrenia (Marx, 2014), pregnenolone added to usual treatment did not improve thinking scores but did improve a test of everyday functioning. The body can turn pregnenolone into other steroids, including progesterone, DHEA and, from those, testosterone and estrogens, so tell your prescriber if you take it, especially alongside hormone therapy.
We could not find a published human half-life for oral pregnenolone. The body converts it into other steroids, and studies usually measure those rather than a single pregnenolone curve, so we do not list one here.
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