Are anti-aging hormones safe??? Want to trade in your body for a younger model? Hormone supplements hold promise, but carry risks. Top experts debate what you should do - Expert Roundtable

Natural Health, May-June, 2003 by Erin O'Donnell

Klatz: I have a real hard time with these bogeymen that are brought up about side effects and cancer, because we just don't see that. There are now over 11,500 members of the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine. Many thousands of our members are prescribing hormone replacement therapy for their patients. Hundreds of thousands of patients and our doctors get together frequently throughout the year, and if there was a horrendous side-effect profile, it certainly would make itself known.

Rothenberg: We're not just talking about human growth hormone. In anti-aging medicine, we're looking at the whole patient and [changing her lifestyle first]: nutrition, exercise, and stress reduction. Then we're carefully measuring and monitoring hormones and replacing them as needed with bioidentical hormones--the same molecules that exist in humans--to achieve youthful levels.

Klatz: When you apply these therapies properly, it's common to have people [appear to be younger on] an objective, quantifiable basis. You can measure [parameters like their blood pressure and cholesterol], their strength, their energy levels, their memory. You can measure these biomarkers of aging and see a regression of two years, five years, 10 years, and in some remarkable individuals, a regression of 20 years.

Rothenberg: What amazes me so much--and I have a very sophisticated group of patients--is that they say, "My life is much better than before I started [anti-aging] therapy."

Sahelian: Just because we're noticing improvements in the short-term does not mean a person will live longer than they were going to live. I think the gentlemen are being overly optimistic and not cautious enough, which could be potentially harmful for a lot of patients. Klatz: Even if our patients don't live a day longer, if their quality of life improves significantly, that's enough for me as a physician. But it's virtually impossible to find any study where you improve the quality of life without increasing quantity of life.

DOES SCIENCE BACK THIS UP?

Few anti-aging hormones have been thoroughly studied, but we do have new research about HGH: A recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association gave elderly people HGH for six months. Dr. Harman, as a co-author of this study, could you tell us what it reveals about HGH?

S. Mitchell Harman: I think it tells us two things. One is that in relatively high doses and given with testosterone, HGH can improve muscle strength and cardiac endurance. I think it's a very hopeful finding.... The downside was that we saw a lot of adverse effects [including diabetes and joint pain]. As has been pointed out by Dr. Klatz and others, we gave higher doses than are used in most anti-aging clinics, and we gave doses three times a week instead of every day, mainly for the convenience of our subjects. It is certainly possible that giving lower doses more frequently would reduce the adverse effects.... But as we reduce the doses, I think were less likely to see the beneficial effects. So I think what our study says is: We need to do more studies, and better studies, and longer-term studies, and look at more dose regimens to find out what really works.