The Promise of Longevity

Adapted from the book Resetting the Clock, copyright © by Elmer M. Cranton, M.D, and William Fryer

Life ends eventually, this we know. No one can promise you immortality. But to give you some idea of what can be done, let me ask you a few simple questions.

How would you like to stay healthy far into old age? Not simply breathing but retaining vitality and enthusiasm, enough of both to make life well worth living. And what, for you personally, is the numerical definition of old age? Perhaps your expectations of its limits are a bit on the conservative side. Would you like a longer life? Suppose you were offered an extra ten years, or even twenty years longer than your family history would lead you to expect. Imagine for a moment that the quality of that added life turns out to be far closer to what you enjoyed at thirty than to what you fear to experience at eighty. Are these impossible fantasies?

They won't seem to be once you've read the information posted on his Internet website. I'll tell you about the rise of the pro-longevity hormones—perhaps the most startling series of developments medicine has seen in decades. Indeed, perhaps the most genuinely unusual transformations the art and science of health care has ever undergone. A staggering assault on aging—and one that few people anticipated.

As little as ten years ago, I had no expectation that replacement of the age-depleted hormones in the human body would allow people to live a substantially longer and healthier life. Probably not one doctor in a thousand had even heard a rumor when the last decade began, and even today only a small minority of physicians is well informed about the hormones (with the exception of the sex hormones) discussed here.

Consequently, the subject matter of my book, Resetting the Clock, as excerpted here is markedly different from what you'll find in most current medical books proposing to tell you how to stop aging. Good books, many of them, and I imagine that many of you are already doing what they advise. You've been told that a prudent lifestyle is the ticket to long life. It's good advice, as far as it goes. I'm certainly proud that for more than three decades now I've been encouraging my patients to eat well, exercise, and take nutritional supplements.

Such simple steps frequently change aging lives so effectively that instead of lurching into their sixties ready for their first heart attack and rightly depressed about their physical future, men and women carry on with fairly good energy until they're eighty-five or ninety. How wonderful compared to the alternatives!

But not in any way exceptional. I'll offer recommendations along those lines, including scientific documentation to support my position.

My message is simply that a veritable hormone revolution has rewritten the rule book for human aging. The process of getting older as the human race has known it for thousands of years is about to be—is actually in the process of being—changed utterly. The longer and conspicuously healthier life that I'm proposing for anyone who will reach out and take it will be up around 100, 110, or 120. Those are the outer limits of longevity right now. Only about one out of every fifty human beings now makes it to the century mark. A woman in Arles, France, recently clocked in at 121 and became the oldest human being for whom reliable records exist. She is an oddity, a gerontological anomaly right now. In a few more decades, believe me, she isn't going to seem so odd.

TESTING THE WATERS

In a small way, the hormone revolution has already begun. The very first of the pro-longevity hormones began surging into prominence more than forty years ago. That was estrogen.

In the 1990s more than fifty million American women will reach menopause, and at least 20 percent of them will take female hormones to ease the passage. Despite recent controversy, a very large percentage of these hormonal adventurers will then go on to take them for life.

This mass supplementation with the female sex hormones is far more revolutionary than people realize. Although the pro-longevity effects of estrogen and progesterone are limited without some of the other hormones I'll be discussing, the principle is the same. People are putting back into their bodies what the aging process has taken out. And, for the most part, they're finding that they like it. The aging process is to some extent a deficiency state that can be corrected.

The results are worth cheering about. Millions of women have safely been on female hormone replacement therapy for decades, and with proven benefit. Using present day methods of administration, the likelihood of increased cancer risk has been shown to be extremely small, if at all, and virtually every sizable study of post-menopausal women has proven that women who take hormones live longer and are generally far healthier than women who don't. Good news for the human race.

But although nearly every bit of new scientific information indicates that even better news is on the way for all of us, male and female alike, the subject matter here remains controversial to its core. DHEA, human growth hormone, testosterone, melatonin—to name the most significant of the substances I'll be telling you about—are not yet prescribed by most physicians. They are being vigorously studied and hotly debated in academic circles. Because the immense attractiveness of the effects they produce is supported by only five to ten years of experimental studies on humans, many conservative medical authorities see them as a potentially reckless alteration of the normal practice of both medicine and aging.

I don't agree with that, and I would certainly be willing to argue my case—indeed, I'm about to—but very probably the whole controversy is going to be taken right out of our hands. The American public will do it. I know my country-men well enough to predict they won't be satisfied with one sip from this potential fountain of youth.

Estrogen was a mere beginning. It, too, sprang into wide-spread use without extensive preliminary testing, largely because the terrifying effects of osteoporosis on aging women virtually mandated its use in spite of considerable resistance from a cautious medical world. Now, as the chapters ahead will show you, the pro-longevity hormones promise a partial reprieve of sentence for the most terrifying health hazard of all—aging itself. And the most extraordinary thing about these hormones is that they're not extraordinary—they're utterly natural. They're the very substances that our bodies secrete abundantly when we were young. And now we know that those substances have elements of youth in them.

We are the carriers of our own youth. It flows within us, magical and rich. Then, as age dries us up, we become the hollowed-out sticks, stiff and painfully uninvigorated caricatures of what we were. Of course, we have never had options in these matters. Age did with us what it would. Our creaky joints and flaccid muscles, our sadly depleted sex drive, our tired days and unsettled nights were our destiny. At least until now.

Point of Departure

In 1990 a team of researchers at the University of Wisconsin led by Dr. Daniel Rudman published a revolutionizing paper in the New England Journal of Medicine. Its simple title: "Effects of Human Growth Hormone in Men Over 60 Years Old."

What should growth hormone have to do with men over sixty? Growth hormone is critical for the growth of children and falls steadily once adulthood is reached. Few doctors had ever considered giving it to grown-ups. But when the twenty-one healthy elderly men in Dr. Rudman's study were given it, they quite literally grew in youthful ways. They grew muscle, they grew a thicker and healthier skin, they grew bone density. Inevitably something was lost: fat. If these men were like others who have been studied since, they probably also grew larger and more durable livers, kidneys, and spleens, for our organs shrink, too, as we grow old.

In many respects, Rudman's men grew younger. After six months of treatment, many of them looked ten to fifteen years younger than when they started.

Reported in the newspapers then, but largely forgotten since, this was one of the first drumbeats of the hormone revolution.

What's Nature; What's Age?

What's aging? Why does it occur? Clearly nature has worked out a system of planned obsolescence for all of us. Just as clearly many of us intend to thwart nature's designs for as long as we're able.

Many theories have been hatched in an attempt to explain our decline. Some scientists believe that every time cells divide, the copying mechanism introduces new errors in our DNA—that's the "worn template" theory. Others believe that our bodies are gradually poisoned by an accumulation of chemical toxins that they can no longer effectively excrete. Long-term failure of the immune system is a hypothesis that has attracted many supporters; certainly, as we grow older, there is a progressive decline in the immune system's ability to detect and destroy infections and developing cancers.

All of these theories may well form part of a complex whole. It certainly seems true that our bodies are in some larger sense organized for decline. Many gerontologists have theorized the existence of an "aging clock," an orderly process whose command center or centers we have not yet identified but from which, nevertheless, a message goes to our various organs and glands that says: "Time's up!" There's a mechanism inside each of our cells that clearly has a major role to play in clocking our demise.

But, when all our theories have been considered, there is certainly no doubt that much of the aging we so visibly notice is tied to the slowing of hormonal systems that do not seem to have been significantly damaged by toxins or misbehaving cells. They simply are not producing what they used to produce. An invisible timer has slowed their pace. Men and women who take care of themselves, who are relatively unstressed, well exercised, intelligently nourished, and entirely healthy, nonetheless—once they pass their youthful prime—find themselves secreting progressively smaller amounts of the hormones that are essential to life.

Why this occurs is uncertain. The fact that it occurs is absolutely as well documented as the rising of the sun is well observed. Our vital fluids, so to speak, are draining away. If you were ghoulishly inclined, you might say that you were being vampirized by your own body.

This is one of the most interesting aspect of aging because we can do something about it. The hormones that keep us young are now readily replaceable.

What are these hormones? Let me name them briefly. The most important ones, according to our present knowledge, are:

● Human Growth Hormone (HGH)—always known to be vital in childhood, this is now recognized as a major player in the repair and upkeep of the adult body and has such beneficial effects in older people that it alone may significantly extend longevity and vastly improve quality of life.

●.DHEA (dehydroepiandrosterone)—this, one of our chief adrenal hormones, has many mysterious roles and functions in the body. If we now recognize its importance, it is largely because we observe the extraordinary effects that supplementation with it can produce.

●.Melatonin—the major product of our brain's pineal gland, melatonin certainly ensures a good night's sleep, but, more importantly, it may control the body's aging clock.

●.Estrogen and progesterone—the female body does not respond favorably to the sudden and almost total deprivation of its sex hormones at menopause. Postmenopausal women who replace them know how significantly vitalizing estrogen and progesterone can be. Statisticians know that women who take them live longer, and someday all women may know what a sacrifice they are making if they avoid them.

●.Testosterone–this male hormone has become some men's secret weapon against aging. Will it go mainstream, as estrogen has done? We are on the verge of such a breakthrough.

MIRROR, MIRROR ON THE WALL,
HOW DO MY HORMONES FALL?

You started life with ample supplies of some of these vital substances. When you reached puberty, the sex hormones kicked in, and things really changed. At the same time, the hormones that directly promote growth, energy, and strength began surging to new heights. From your early teens to your mid-twenties, you had a physical force and dynamism that probably astonishes you when you look back upon it. And then—very slowly, at first—this energy, the strength to move mountains, diminished. By the time most of us are forty, we realize we're no longer quite so young. By the time we're fifty, "middle-aged"—a stuffy, unexciting expression if ever there was one—it seems like our inevitable self-description. Soon, as the years pass, there's no way to escape it-we're not young anymore, we can't climb mountains, at least not easily, and we probably don't want to.

But I'd like you to remember that this inevitable, time-related decline in hormonal vitality seems to affect some individuals differently. It's not that they don't have an aging clock, but it's set on a different time.

If you think about it, you'll realize that there have always been people who by some accident of natural endowment seem to temporarily negate the hard-headed certainties of aging. Indeed, in any century, there are men and women who amaze their contemporaries by what they do in old age. Winston Churchill was running the affairs of embattled wartime England in his seventies, and, then, in his next five years of enforced retirement, wrote a massive six-volume history of the Second World War. Giuseppe Verdi composed two of his greatest operas in his early eighties. Grandma Moses was painting pictures throughout her eighties, and Picasso was going strong until almost ninety. But this sort of extended vigorous life is not confined to the exceptionally talented. Humbler folk, like you and me, are busy even as I write, managing their businesses, farming their acres, or carrying on their medical practices in their eighties or nineties. Unusual, yes, but definitely common enough that many of us have met one or two examples.

It is a very safe bet that each of these individuals had—by some accident of genetic endowment—the capacity to retain relatively high levels of essential hormones into old age. Without those hormones, all the character and determination in the world would not have been enough to keep them functioning at a high level in the home stretch. Very simply, the wheels don't turn without gas in the tank.

But even these lucky people weren't functioning the way they did when they were young. What if, in addition to their relatively bountiful natural endowments, they had been taking supplemental doses of hormones so that their levels of growth hormone, DHEA, melatonin, and the major sex hormones had been raised to what they had when young? The experiences of many people and the evidence of carefully conducted scientific studies reported in the medical journals of the world strongly suggest that they would have been even more vital and energetic than they were. And there is certainly reason to think many of them would have lived longer.

The experiences of experimental animals lucky enough to have received hormone replacement therapy is that life spans can be extended by as much as 30 percent. We don't know if we can achieve an increase in longevity that great in humans, because no one has been supplemented with the major hormones for a long enough period to show such increases. The whole medical world—at least that part of it whose interest is centered on gerontology, the science of aging—is watching and waiting.

Changing Nature ?

But is this the path we wish to follow? It certainly must be clear to you by now that I'm proposing nothing less than a reversal of the body's natural process of hormonal decline. As you get older, melatonin, human growth hormone, DHEA, estrogen, and testosterone will decline radically and, until the development of hormone replacement therapy, irreversibly. As you'll see in the next few chapters, there's nothing subtle about these falls. When it comes to hormones, a normal seventy-year-old is making do with short rations; a normal ninety-year-old is alarmingly close to an empty tank.

This hormone drop is part of nature's plan. We see it in animals just as reliably as in humans. Dare we interfere with the planned depletion of the hormonal reservoir?

I honestly don't see how we could be true to ourselves if we didn't. First of all, let me note that before the twentieth century, a clear majority of human beings never got old enough to be adversely affected by a decline in hormone levels. As late as 1890, the average life expectancy was around forty-five years. A whole lot's changed since then, including better food and water supplies, vastly improved sanitation, less crowded living conditions, more adequate housing, central heating, and a host of medical breakthroughs.

If it's unnatural to interfere with planned hormonal obsolescence as we age, then I'd certainly like to know how that unnatural interference differs from all the other equally unnatural things we've been doing in medicine since 1900. In this century we declared war on microbes by developing vaccines and inventing antibiotics. Infectious and parasitic diseases used to kill the largest portion of men and women. Not anymore. In the last forty years surgery got its turn. Amazing creative solutions to intractable medical dilemmas. In your wildest dreams, can you imagine anything more unnatural than organ transplants?

I don't think it makes sense to belabor this point. It's quite clear God wouldn't have given us the abilities we possess if we weren't supposed to use them. If there's anything that's really and truly natural to us it's the compulsion to forge the best possible life for ourselves. No question that for most people that will include the longest and healthiest span of years on this earth that human ingenuity—a natural endowment, if ever there was one—can devise.

The pro-longevity hormones are potentially the great transformers. What vaccinations and antibiotics were to the twentieth century, they may be to the twenty-first. Get out your time-pieces, folks, we're about to reset the clock.

WILL THIS BE YOU?

How much can the pro-longevity hormones do for one? Let me offer an example.

There is a man in Florida named Carl. He's a very interesting human being. Carl is a successful stockbroker. He works full time at it and has for many years. In his youth, Carl was a navy pilot flying from aircraft carriers. He's married now, settled down and well satisfied with life.

Carl's always been a physically active person, and his daily regimen includes a three-and-a-half-mile run along the beach. He also belongs to a scuba diving club. He just got back from diving in the Red Sea, and last year he went diving off Honduras in the Caribbean and explored some of the underwater caves on that Central American country's coast. Carl generally dives three or four times a month, often going as deep as one to two hundred feet. Those who know something about diving will tell you that the physical strain of reaching such depths is considerable. Carl, however, keeps up with his scuba diving comrades without difficulty.

Which is intriguing, because Carl is seventy-five years old, and none of the men he dives with is over fifty. Carl has been taking injections of human growth hormone for the past twelve years and swallowing a daily dose of the adrenal hormone DHEA for the past six.

I sometimes think Carl Everett may be the face of the future.