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| Feature |
Buying Youth
Fran Hawthorne
11/01/2007
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Still, from Ponce de Leon to Dorian Gray, humans have sought
eternal youth—and affluent, youth-obsessed baby boomers are hardly about to turn
their increasingly aching backs on the newest scientific advances. After all,
this is what medicine and public health have really been doing for the last 100
years—extending the human life span through innovations such as vaccines and
clean water. "We live much longer than our Babylonian ancestors, and I don’t
hear anybody saying that’s unnatural," Caplan says. Thus, government and
industry officials estimate that at least 30,000 largely affluent Americans have
tried the newest age-fighting strategies: hormones, extreme dieting, red wine,
cellular regeneration and a hodgepodge of old-fashioned advice with a scientific
twist.
TOP VIEW
If Ponce de Leon were alive, he would be visiting
doctors, rather than searching for a magic fountain. Today affluent patients pay
large sums for access to the latest treatments designed to increase longevity
and even reverse the signs of aging. Despite their cost, however, many such
techniques are controversial, if not illegal, and their side effects may not be fully understood. |
Hormones
Around 40, people see a decrease in testosterone, estrogen,
human growth hormone and IGF-1 (a hormone whose production is spurred by growth
hormone) levels. Those changes can lead to problems ranging from memory loss and
a lower sex drive, to muscle weakness and a higher risk of heart disease.
Audrey Kubie, the wife of a Manhattan finance executive, felt
like she was going crazy four years ago. "I was forgetting lunch dates. I
couldn’t come up with words." She joked that it was early-onset Alzheimer’s
disease at age 53, but she didn’t really believe that. Then her neurologist,
Gayatri Devi, told her the problem was a menopause-related decline in
estrogen.
To reach such a diagnosis, Devi runs new patients through four
hours of cognitive testing she calls a "stress test for the brain," homing in on
their abstract thinking and visual, verbal, short-term and long-term memory.
(Devi, who directs the independent clinic New York Memory and Healthy Aging
Services, cannot talk about individuals like Kubie, but could describe her usual
routine.) Patients may be asked to name as many words beginning with "C" as they
can within one minute. Or they might study a list of words, then try to recall
the list 15 minutes later. Their scores are compared with those of other people
of the same gender, education level and age range. (A 55-year-old man with a
master’s degree should come up with 12 "C" words; a woman with the same
criteria, 15.) For the first year, the tests, weekly treatments and
prescriptions typically cost about $22,000—in cash, because Devi, like most
anti-aging practitioners, does not take insurance.
In addition to cognitive tests, anti-aging specialists
typically take blood and urine samples (to check hormone levels) and ask
patients to fill out questionnaires about their nutrition, exercise and
lifestyle. Braverman reads brain waves to measure factors like voltage and the
speed at which information is processed, which he says relate to the production
of various hormones. In one test, he gauges how quickly people react to flashes
of light and sound. For his part, Joseph Raffaele, a doctor who cofounded the
anti-aging clinic PhysioAge Medical Group in Manhattan, looks for biomarkers, or
physiological measurements, that could indicate symptoms of aging.
If doctors discern a hormone deficiency—and they almost always
do around age 50—they prescribe replacements: for women, specially formulated
estrogen, perhaps made from yams or soy. Both genders will probably get
testosterone. And, anywhere from 25 to 60 percent of the time, physicians will
prescribe human growth hormone.
This is where things get sticky. The first controversy is
whether growth hormones really work. Certainly, there are plenty of success
stories like Vidor’s. And it’s generally accepted that HGH can build muscle mass
and bone density. Physician Mark L. Gordon of Los Angeles, who treats Vidor,
along with an A-list of executives and celebrities, rattles off a long roster of
claimed benefits from the hormone: "Mental abilities will increase, physical
stamina increases, sexual function increases, scars disappear, the hair grows
and it starts turning from gray to black. Growth hormone shuts off fat buildup
and enhances fat drop-off." Testosterone, he adds, can help smooth out wrinkles
on women’s faces.
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