Scientists dismiss promises, say more research needed into why we grow old

10/02/2002

By Laura Beil / The Dallas Morning News

If scientists could save time in a bottle, lots of folks would buy a case.

As Americans grow older, many seem transfixed on their vanishing youth. Age-defying products – once the trademarks of smarmy salesmen – are now gilded in scientific-sounding terms, wooing customers alongside $20 tubes of mascara.

Tired of losing what you'd rather keep and gaining what you'd rather lose? Are wrinkles in the mirror closer than they appear? Science has the solution for you: Inject it, swallow it, smear it on, wipe it off.

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In response, anti-aging specialists say people don't want to sit around plucking gray hairs while picky scientists haggle over details. Enough is known now to offer immediate benefit, says a leading anti-aging Web site, and the scientific establishment is simply orchestrating a propaganda campaign to "maintain its unilateral control over the funding of today's research in aging."

These disagreements used to be little more than low-level sniping. That changed dramatically this summer, when 51 of the nation's top aging researchers lobbed a large grenade, publishing an anti-anti-aging "position statement" in Scientific American. Suddenly, anti-aging-bashing became a contact sport.

But given time, many of these disputes may resolve themselves. In the future, some scientists say, we will understand why the body gets older, perhaps giving anti-aging medicine a firmer scientific base.

"I think we'll have real breakthroughs in the next 10 years," said Dr. Mitch Harman, president of the Kronos Longevity Research Institute, a not-for-profit, privately funded research center in Phoenix.

But first, researchers such as Dr. Harman must figure out why people grow old at all. Which matters more: the genes a body is born with, or the environment that assaults it afterward? Ponce de Leon had a fine idea, these modern explorers believe – just bad geography. The fountain of youth does exist, but it is hidden somewhere inside our own cells. To find it, scientists are sifting through bits of DNA, sorting out which genes are most important for long life. Until their search ends, they say, travel the road to longevity with a healthy diet, exercise and seat belts.

Living longer

For some people, this strategy is paying off. The average life expectancy in the United States soared by more than 25 years during the last century. In 2000, more than 50,000 Americans had celebrated their 100th birthdays. In 1960, that number was just 3,000.

But these gains are largely victories over premature death, not over aging. Progress in sanitation, vaccination and antibiotic treatment has eliminated the threat of many childhood infectious diseases. Generations ago, heart disease and cancer were not the main killers because fewer people lived long enough to develop them.

Researchers who study aging say they are not so much interested in curing cancer and heart disease, but in sparing the body from these afflictions. "Aging is not cancer. Aging is not heart disease," Dr. Harman said. "Aging is the process that makes us vulnerable to all these other things."

Some doctors do not necessarily separate the concept of living healthier with living longer. They've formed an official association, the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine, known as the A4M. It has attracted more than 10,000 members, most of them health-care providers. (Repeated requests to speak with A4M leaders, as well as an e-mailed list of questions, were not answered.)

"Perhaps the most significant achievement of A4M has been the global adoption of the notion that 'aging is not inevitable,' " the organization's Web site states.

Fighting words

Such statements have led to the increasingly acidic exchanges between gerontologists who care for the aged, and doctors in the new field dedicated to keeping people young. In the Scientific American article, the scientists wrote that "no currently marketed intervention – none – has yet been proved to slow, stop or reverse human aging, and some can be downright dangerous."

Part of the reason for their action, said lead author Jay Olshansky of the University of Illinois at Chicago, is that he and his colleagues had grown sick of seeing their own science hijacked for questionable claims. Scientists rarely agree on anything, he said, but in this case "we decided ... we would all agree that the more important message to get out to the public was that these anti-aging medicines don't exist."

The A4M, on its Web site, counterattacked with equal fury, making reference to a conspiracy among scientists, journalists and the federal government to discredit the anti-aging movement and co-opt research funds for career bureaucrats.

The goals of A4M, the site said, "threaten the very core of existence of the gerontological establishment, posing a serious challenge to the well-established financial arrangements and personal reputations involved therein. To respond, the gerontological establishment has systematically engaged in the press to advance its biased position, securing high-exposure coverage for its propaganda campaign purporting that anti-aging interventions are ineffective and harmful."

Scientists say that one reason they dismiss anti-aging medicine is that aging itself is still a mystery. No one knows why some people's bodies wear out after 70 years of use and others keep going well past 100. Some of it has to do with heredity – studies of centenarians have hinted at genes that may be particularly busy or silent among the long-lived. Now, researchers are trying to figure out what those genes tell the body to do.

The body may also age because of damage from molecules called free radicals. Free radicals of oxygen are so desperate for a chemical reaction that they will attack enzymes, DNA and just about any other cell component in their path. Cells have mechanisms to fix the damage. But perhaps somewhere along the way, an aging cell loses its ability to repair itself.

Still other theories contend that the body ages because the hormones of youth evaporate. Levels of growth hormone, estrogen, testosterone and a host of other substances fall with age. Why hormones retreat, however, isn't clear. Nor is it known whether replacing them will keep a body young.

And aging may turn out to have not one source, but many different biological tributaries feeding into it. If so, damming one creek won't stop the river.

So far, there is only one known way to delay aging: severely restrict calories. Decades ago, researchers recognized that rats had a longer life span if they were fed a very-low-calorie but balanced diet. Scientists have now tested the theory in other rodents, monkeys, flies, worms, fish, even yeast.

All these creatures live longer and have fewer diseases than their sated counterparts.

In people, this strategy would translate to the diet of a pencil-legged fashion model. A person who now eats 2,500 calories a day would have to drop to roughly 1,750. Living longer might mean living hungrier.

But not necessarily, scientists say. Teams of researchers are in laboratories amid skinny animals to find out why a low-calorie diet protects a body from aging. The goal: Develop a pill that might produce the same effect while allowing three squares a day.

Even if that pill existed, it would be meaningless if people didn't enjoy the extra years science granted. And fuller lives today are what many anti-aging disciples are truly seeking.

"I'm not taking this to bulk up as a body builder," said Dallas-area dentist Edward Hobbs, 58, who has received growth hormone injections for about a year. He merely wants to keep age from eroding his physical and mental sharpness.

"Extending life doesn't have a lot of meaning if you're not healthy," said Dr. Alan Mintz, head of Cenegenics Medical Institute in Las Vegas. Patients who come to his clinic don't necessarily want to live to 120, he said. Their desires are simpler. "They want to know who their children are when they're 85 years old. They don't want a colostomy bag."

Dr. Mintz presides over the largest center in the country for people wanting anti-aging medicine. By frequently prescribing growth hormone and heavy doses of antioxidant vitamins, he raises the ire of many scientists and medical colleagues. But few would object to his doctrine of eating better, exercising and reducing stress.

"There are certainly common-sense measures you can take in your own life to prevent disease," said Kronos' Dr. Harman. You'll still get older, but you might die later. And in that sense, he and others say, the secret to more tomorrows may lie in simply better living today.

Article courtesy of the Dallas Morning News