While this is not related to low-carb, I find it very promising that it has become mainstream, the idea that denouncing low-carb diets is based on clinging to the past fear of change, not on science!
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To Stop Aging, First Stop Fighting
By FRED BROCK
The e-mail advertisement said, "Forget aging and dieting forever!" Ditto for exercise. "Turn back your body's biological time clock 10-20 years in six months of usage!!!"
Thinking that I could sure use a few good extra years to finally learn to program my VCR, I kept reading. But the pitch was a little vague on what exactly would accomplish this. I was invited to click to a Web site for free information and a free one-month supply of what was only referred to as "HGH."
As I suspected, HGH turned out to be human growth hormone — sort of. What the Web site is actually selling is something called a human growth hormone "releaser," which is supposed to "stimulate the pituitary gland to produce and distribute youthful levels of HGH." This, the site goes on, will "prevent biological aging" and reverse a "broad range" of aging symptoms from wrinkles to failing sexual performance.
Ads like this, as well as the hormone itself, are at the epicenter of a continuing nasty battle between the gerontological medical establishment and proponents of what are known as anti-aging medicines, estimated to be a multibillion-dollar-a-year business. Human growth hormone is a prescription drug that must be injected for any results. Some doctors operate "anti-aging clinics" that may charge $1,000 or more a month to give such injections to people trying to turn back the clock. Some medical researchers warn that these treatments are unproved and potentially dangerous.
Results of a clinical study published last month in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that human growth hormone did increase lean muscle mass and fat loss in test subjects, but that the gains were accompanied by adverse side effects in nearly half the cases. The side effects included pre-diabetes, diabetes, aching joints and swollen tissues.
Dr. S. Mitchell Harman, director of the Kronos Longevity Research Institute in Phoenix and an author of the study, says he believes that medical science may someday be able to take 20 years off your age. "But we sure as hell can't now," Dr. Harman said. "Anyone who says they can is of the P. T. Barnum school."
Dr. Tom Perls, an associate professor at Boston University Medical School and director of the New England Centenarian Study, hopes the human growth hormone study will be the "death knell" for the hormone's use as an anti-aging agent. "Before this, we didn't have that much armor to attack these guys," he said.
But Dr. Ronald Klatz, president of the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine in Chicago and a leading proponent of human growth hormone, contends that the side effects of Dr. Harman's study were hyped. He said they were a result of doses of the hormone that were too big.
"They used inappropriately high doses that were two to three times higher than they need to be for anti-aging or rejuvenation purposes," he said. "With our lower doses, we see almost none of these side effects; when we do, we adjust the doses down and the side effects go away."
Dr. Harman responded: "You know, it is possible they are right. Reduced doses and more frequent dosing could dilute out the adverse effects and still produce some beneficial effects. But the problem is, no one has studied this. There are no data. There are just the anecdotal reports of these clinics and the people they serve, or disserve, as the case may be."
He added that he planned to propose that some of these clinics allow him to study their patients to find out if what they're doing really works. But he said he doubted that the anti-aging doctors would cooperate. "They never get back to me," he said. "They don't want to know."
Dr. Klatz responded with an unprintable expletive.
I'm not sure how keen these dueling doctors may be on taking advice from someone who flunked college biology, but here goes: If there's any hope that this stuff can work at lower doses, then stop fighting and get together and test it.
History is rich with stories of new ideas and treatments that had a tough time getting past establishment resistance. It wasn't so long ago that surgeons scoffed at washing their hands before operating on people. The doctor who linked blood levels of homocysteine to heart disease in 1969 was virtually booted out of Harvard Medical School only to be proved right years later. The Atkins diet, nearly universally condemned 25 years ago, now has a degree of mainstream medical acceptance.
RAY OLSHANSKY, an epidemiology professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a critic of anti-aging medicine, said many doctors confuse the manifestations of aging with aging itself. "Even if we cured heart disease, cancer and stroke, we wouldn't have altered aging," he said. "The cellular process of aging will continue and people will get old and die. But research scientists are on track to alter the biological rate of aging. We think it's going to happen in our lifetime."
Professor Olshansky agreed that the dosage controversy over the hormone should be tested using standard scientific methods. "But the anti-aging proponents will be critical of anything that comes up with conclusions that are not consistent with what they're doing," he added.
I warned you that this was a nasty battle.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/01/b....html?tntemail0
History, Atkins and Past Medical Establishment Resistance
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