Hope drives antiaging hype.

Hope drives antiaging hype EDITORIAL S THE 75 MILLION baby boomers see their parents facing age-related problems (and begin to experience some of their own), this segment of our population is spending billions of dollars in response to enticing but often misleading marketing. And because we live in a world of medical revolutions and cures, many people accept antiaging claims as fact, particularly when the claims are accompanied by pictures of scholarly looking people in white coats with stethoscopes hanging around their necks. Antiaging, longevity, and age-management clinics and institutes offer benefits that would appear to the appropriately skeptical eye to be too good to be true. Some advertisers claim that with their products or services you can do some or all of the following: • Reverse 2 decades of aging • Live to be 125 or older • Give yourself a natural face-lift and body muscle rejuvenation • Substantially reduce your adipose tissue • Increase your skin thickness and elasticity • Increase your lean body mass • Increase your physical strength and energy • Lower your cholesterol. The therapies have high price tags to add even more credibility, and the gullible are swallowing these claims hook, line, and sinker. The bottom line is that no substance has been shown in a scientifically rigorous manner to stop or reverse aging. What is surprising is the huge market that has been developed by " swindlers, hucksters, and snake oil salesmen " (as described by witnesses before a Senate subcommittee), 1 as intense marketing campaigns overwhelm the small objective, academic, and consumer-advocate presence on the Internet and elsewhere. 2 As patients are more and more inundated with fountain-of-youth promises, they are increasingly coming to their health care providers for advice, and herein lies the importance of reliable information on the subject. In this issue of the Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine, Kamel and colleagues provide an objective review of the most prominent substances claimed to enhance longevity, appropriately dividing them into dietary supplements and hormones. We normally think of dietary supplements as vitamins and minerals, but the 1994 Dietary Supplement Health Education Act (DSHEA) also includes herbs or other botanical products , amino acids, concentrates, metabolites, and extracts in this category. The wording of " concentrates " and " extracts " provides a loophole big enough to drive a truck through. Many substances that should be regulated as drugs are sold, relatively …