recent NYTimes article on anti-aging therapy

[globe@zipcon.net]

be interested to hear what your friends says about his experience.  there is a 
big clinic out here which specializes in this sort of thing.  They call 
themselves 'Neuage' and it is prononuced as in french word for cloud.
 best,
  Carolyn

Quoting Michael Eisenstadt <michaele@ando.pair.com>:

> This article is SO informative and SO need-to-read that I copied
> it into this email rather than just putting in a link to the Times.
> 
> One of our subscribers is/was undergoing this therapy. His comments 
> on this will be appreciated.
> 
> -------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Chasing Youth, Many Gamble on Hormones
> By GINA KOLATA
> 
> Dr. Ron Livesey was fat, tired and out of shape. At 49, he felt that
> his
> best years were behind him.
> 
> So one day seven years ago, on his way to a medical meeting, he stopped
> at a doctor's office in Palm Springs, Calif., for his first hormone
> injections. 
> 
> Early the next morning, Dr. Livesey was at the meeting, sitting in a
> darkened auditorium watching slides of technical data. To his surprise,
> he found himself alert, taking everything in. He continued the hormone
> treatments.
> 
> "People started commenting that I had so much more bounce and energy,"
> he said. He lost 50 pounds — thanks, he said, to diet changes and
> exercise made possible by the increased vigor.
> 
> So Dr. Livesey, then an internist in New Hampshire, decided to go into
> business for himself. With a colleague, Dr. Joseph Raffaele, who went
> on
> a similar regimen, he founded Anti-Aging Medicine Associates, a clinic
> in Manhattan. They are part of a growing movement among doctors to
> offer
> a hormone replacement therapy that claims to restore the bodies and
> energy of youth. 
> 
> Until recently, most scientists considered anti-aging treatments to be
> little more than snake oil, provided by hucksters. Now, few doubt that
> growth hormone and testosterone can reshape aging bodies, potentially
> making them more youthful.
> 
> But whether they counteract aging is unknown. And their long-term risks
> are ill defined. So medical experts ask whether it is right to regard
> aging as a disease, as fierce as a malignant cancer, to be fought with
> any and all means, tested or not.
> 
> "How much are you willing to pay for a treatment that is not proven?"
> asked Dr. Huber Warner, an associate director at the National Institute
> on Aging. "How much risk are you willing to take?" 
> 
> But Dr. Ronald Klatz of Chicago, the founder and director of the
> American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine, says patients cannot wait for
> long-term studies, which are not even in planning stages and would take
> years or decades to complete. "We'd have to wait," he said, "until the
> baby boomers are dead and in the ground and worms' meat."
> 
> Clearly, many are not waiting. The academy, which began with 12 doctors
> in 1993, now has 8,000 physician members in the United States, Dr.
> Klatz
> said.
> 
> The treatment is expensive: $1,000 a month for the panoply of drugs and
> dietary supplements, including human growth hormone and testosterone
> for
> men and women, estrogen and progesterone for women (the doctors say
> their "bioidentical" hormones are safe), melatonin, DHEA, vitamins and
> antioxidants.
> 
> The unlikely hero of today's anti-aging movement was Dr. Daniel Rudman,
> an academic researcher at the Medical College of Wisconsin who asked if
> he could reverse the effects of aging by giving growth hormone to
> elderly men.
> 
> Aging people, he noted, lose muscle and put on fat, their skin thins
> and
> their bones weaken. At the same time, growth hormone levels steadily
> decline. He observed that the effects of aging also appeared in young
> people who lacked growth hormone for medical reasons. 
> 
> So he gave growth hormone to 12 elderly men for six months, reporting
> that they gained muscle and lost fat. Nine men who served as controls
> had no such body changes. In his paper, published on July 5, 1990, in
> The New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Rudman concluded with this
> sentence: "The effects of six months of growth hormone on lean body
> mass
> and adipose-tissue mass were equivalent in magnitude to the changes
> incurred during 10 to 20 years of aging."
> 
> Dr. Klatz, of the Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine, called the paper "a
> thunderclap in the medical profession." 
> 
> "It was the first clinical paper in a mainstream U.S. medical journal
> to
> show that there were available interventions that could have a dramatic
> effect on the physiology of aging," he said. 
> 
> Human growth hormone has been approved by the Food and Drug
> Administration for use by people with medical deficiencies, and once a
> drug is on the market, doctors can legally prescribe it for any reason.
> 
> 
> 
> "I was thrilled by the concept," said Dr. Maxine Papadakis of the
> University of California in San Francisco. But Dr. Papadakis said she
> worried about the sweeping conclusion about reversing aging. It was a
> small study, she said, and the men who took part knew who was taking
> growth hormone and who was not.
> 
> Dr. Papadakis set out to test growth hormone in 52 healthy men from 70
> to 85. She designed the study so that the men did not know if they were
> taking the drug or a dummy medication.
>  
> Reporting in 1996, she found that growth hormone slightly increased
> muscle mass and decreased body fat but, paradoxically, did not make the
> men stronger. People had claimed it improved their mental clarity, but
> she found no such effects; if anything, those taking growth hormone did
> slightly worse on memory tests. They also suffered swollen legs and
> feet
> and achy joints, making them so uncomfortable that a quarter taking
> growth hormone had their doses reduced during the study.
> 
> Dr. Papadakis said her results were ignored by growth hormone
> enthusiasts. "They can't let go of the hypothesis because they like
> it,"
> she said.
> 
> Others, like Dr. Warner, worry about animal studies.
> 
> "I agree that mice and rats are not people, but mice that don't make
> growth hormone live longer," Dr. Warner said. "Mice that overproduce
> growth hormone live shorter lives. The same principle applies in fruit
> flies and little worms called nematodes. It may be irrelevant, but it
> makes us wonder."
> 
> The next major paper was published on Nov. 13 in The Journal of the
> American Medical Association. In it, Dr. S. Mitchell Harman of the
> Kronos Longevity Research Institute in Phoenix and Dr. Marc Blackman of
> the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, part of
> the National Institutes of Health, reported that older men and women
> taking growth hormone lost fat and gained lean body mass without
> dieting
> or exercising. They did not formally assess the subjects' appearance.
> But Dr. Harman said, "you could see that some of these guys lost a
> significant amount of pot belly."
> 
> On the other hand, many had the same side effects that afflicted Dr.
> Papadakis's subjects. Although they went away when the subjects stopped
> taking growth hormone, they gave the investigators pause.
> 
> The American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine said in a statement that
> the
> doses used in the study were far too high. Lower doses that reproduce
> the hormone levels of youth are safe and effective, the group said.
> 
> But Dr. Papadakis said those were the levels her study reproduced.
> "Maybe we don't know the right dose," she said. "But then how can you
> be
> giving it to people? Get a grip."
> 
> Dr. Livesey and Dr. Raffaele, at the Anti-Aging Medicine clinic in
> Manhattan, had expected most of their patients to be old people trying
> to gain enough strength to rise from a chair unassisted, or middle-aged
> people wanting to look young. Instead, they tend to be baby boomers,
> the
> doctors said, who are searching for something that other doctors did
> not
> provide.
> 
> "By the time they come here, they've already gone to places to look
> better," Dr. Raffaele said. "They've had the Botox, the plastic
> surgery.
> The reason they're here is they want to have a good quality of life."
> Most keep their visits a secret, he said, adding: "They don't even want
> to tell their close friends. It's kind of like plastic surgery."
> 
> They are like a 50-year-old woman living in New York who arrived at the
> doctors' anti-aging clinic last February. "I was feeling desperate,"
> said the woman, who did not want to give her name because she is
> keeping
> the treatment secret from her friends.
> 
> She was depressed, gaining weight, feeling old and fatigued. But, she
> said, when she began taking growth hormone, estrogen and progesterone,
> she noticed an immediate change in her mood and energy. It gave her the
> stamina and enthusiasm to start dieting and working out at a gym and
> she
> dropped 10 pounds. She said her libido returned, her hair grew, and
> even
> her bunions regressed so she could wear high heels again. 
> 
> Was it the drugs or the power of suggestion, the diet and exercise or
> the growth hormone that made the difference? Will she develop a serious
> disease as a result of taking the drugs or will she enter old age
> healthy and vigorous, younger than her years?
> 
> It is impossible to know, researchers said, and that is why good
> studies
> are needed.
> 
> "Our concern is that the evidence is mostly based on personal
> testimonials rather than good data," Dr. Warner said. "It's not hard to
> get people to believe something works, particularly if they are paying
> a
> lot of money for it."
> 
> Dr. Alvin Matsumoto, a geriatrician at the Veterans Affairs Puget Sound
> Health Care System, sounded a similar note of caution.
> 
> "For any particular patient, the trick is to determine who is the
> practitioner who has your best interests at heart. It is hard to
> distinguish that sometimes."
> 
> 



 Carolyn Siscoe
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