Ponce de Leon was the most celebrated, but certainly not the only, person to spend his life in a fruitless quest for the “fountain of youth.” Repeated failures have not slowed the quest for some magical potion to halt or reverse the ravages of time while a multi-billion dollar cosmetics industry has evolved to camouflage the defeat. Today governments, faced with growing populations of the elderly, maintain an interest in research on the aging process. Recent results indicate that researchers may be on to a compound that slows the aging process but youth, writes Helen Saul, in a recent issue of New Scientist, could come at a high price.

The potential elixer of youth is human growth hormone, a substance that has been known since the 1950s and used to treat young children for dwarfism. Early supplies of the hormone were obtainable only from the pituitary glands of cadavers and was both extremely scarce and costly but this changed in the 1970s when it became possible to make it synthetically in the laboratory. For the first time an adequate supply was available to test on adults. Daniel Rudman, a professor of gerontology at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center, had observed that levels of the hormone are high in a developing fetus, low in early childhood, takes another spurt during puberty, and then declines so that, after age 60, only small amounts are produced. Rudman reasoned that, just as estrogen therapy helps reverse bone loss in aging women, human growth hormone may offset some of the symptoms of aging.

In July 1990, Rudman published his results of administering human growth hormone to 21 elderly, but otherwise healthy, men who had very low levels of the hormone. They all exhibited abdominal fat buildup, loss of muscle mass, and thinning skin associated with aging. After six months of hormonal treatment, all of these symptoms were reversed to a degree that Rudman likened, “equivalent to changes occurring in 10 to 20 years of aging.” A British study, that involved 24 hormone-deficient adults, found they lost about 12 pounds of fat, and gained a comparable amount of lean body mass or muscle in a six-month period.

The media seized on these findings and generated a lot of public interest, far more than the preliminary findings warranted. The National Institute of Health is now funding eight studies on the effects of human growth hormone on the elderly but, not willing to wait for the FDA approval that could take years to obtain, several clinics have set up outside the U.S. and hopeful cliants are flocking to them for injections of the magical “elixer of youth.” Many medical and research people are unhappy with the idea of human growth hormone becoming an unregulated fad and with good reason. Already many side effects have shown up in elderly men including high incidences of carpal tunnel syndrome, increased levels of blood sugar, and a marked enlargement of the breasts.

Other reported side effects include fluid retention, severe headaches, and ____________________________________________________________________ ____________Bell’s palsy, a condition in which one side of the face becomes paralyzed. ____________________________________________________________________ _________ Many doctors and scientists are warning that, far from offering a regained youth, use of the hormone could endanger people’s lives. This is not likely to deter people who are willing to undergo almost any ordeal to just appear younger and it is likely that soon the hormone will be even easier to obtain. The gene for bovine growth factor has been spliced into the DNA of a common bacterium that is now producing large quantities of the hormone that stimulates milk production in cows. Only recently the first milk from treated cows has reached the supermarket shelves amid a great deal of controversy. It is only a matter of time before the gene for human growth factor is introduced into a bacterium paving the way for an almost unlimited supply of the once scarce hormone. This will be a boon for researchers doing legitimate studies on aging but it will also undoubtedly make many unscrupulous physicians very rich as people flock to clinics in a fruitless search for their lost youth.

Clair Wood is a science instructor at Eastern Maine Technical College and the NEWS science columnist.