IF YOU WORRY about ageing, you might be tempted by an internet product called Longevity which, for a mere $44.99 (£28.50) for 90 tablets, will “deliver 2-AEP directly to outer cell walls to strengthen, seal and protect them”. Satisfied clients allegedly include the late John Wayne, Yul Brynner, Anthony Quinn and Natalie Wood.
Sounds promising? Not according to the joint conference of the National Council on Ageing and the American Society on Ageing which this month awarded Longevity the Silver Fleece for the “product that makes the most outrageous or exaggerated claims about human ageing”. The Silver Fleece awards are part of a campaign by eminent gerontologists to create a distinction between the commercial anti-ageing hucksters — whose remedies include last year’s winner, Clustered Water — and the respectable world of academic research.
Recently a panel of experts from leading universities and research institutes issued a statement that “no effective anti-ageing intervention currently exists”. However, the future looks more promising.
“Scientists are on the verge of discovering the major secrets of ageing,” says Jay Olshansky, a gerontologist based at the University of Chicago (and a Silver Fleece judge), although he is still cautious about how long a human being can expect to live. Last year Olshansky bet Steve Austad, a biologist at the University of Idaho, $150 (£95) that there will be no 150-year-old alive in fairly good shape by the year 2150. He believes the upper limit is 130 years. With compound interest, one of their heirs stands to collect $500 million on the bet.
Anti-ageing research receives billions of dollars of funding, yet the academics cannot even agree on what ageing is, let alone what to do about it.
Is it an inevitable process of life? Or a distinct process with signals that start and control it? Or could it be, as one scientist puts it, “characterised by increasing molecular disorder”? The “treatment” for ageing varies as much as the definitions. One approach is to aim for “compressed morbidity” (preventing disorders such as strokes, cancer and heart disease), which would add about 15 years to the average lifespan in the West.
However, Olshansky and others suggest that we should go for “arrested ageing”; this aims to restore vitality continually by reversing the ageing process.
Last month Science magazine provided a snapshot of the latest academic thinking on ageing, including the oldest anti-ageing technique of all: calorie restriction (CR). For more than 60 years it has been known that going on a semi-starvation diet can double the lifespan of mice and worms, and reduce dramatically the risk of degenerative disorders such as cancer and heart disease. However, no one would voluntarily go on a lifetime diet of 1,300 calories, so the latest idea is to tease out the changes that CR makes, such as turning off growth hormone (GH) and insulin growth factor (IGF), and then mimicking that with drugs.
But as Dr Valter Longo, a gerontologist at the University of Southern California, makes clear, a daily pill is still a long way off. While turning off GH can increase lifespan significantly, side effects include dwarfism, obesity, delayed sexual development and muscle wasting. Similarly, reducing IGF can raise insulin levels by 400 per cent.
“Such side effects must be prevented before drugs that simulate dwarf mutations can be considered for human studies,” Longo says. Simple nutritional supplements seem to be a much better option.
Professor Bruce Ames, of the University of California, Berkeley, caused a stir last year when he reported that giving rats acetyl-carnitine and lipoic acid for a few weeks not only restored their metabolism to “youthful” levels, but also “improved their physical capacity and cognitive processes”.
Ames is running a similar study on humans that should be available within the next two years, and says that he expects similar findings. A lack of micronutrients in general is, he says, “likely to be a significant factor in degenerative diseases and genetic diseases”.
But Aubrey de Grey, the most radical of the “arrested ageing” advocates, says that attempting to turn back the clock by modifying hormone pathways with drugs or boosting vitamin and antioxidant intake is mere handwaving. It is carrying out “frenzied and futile running repairs” when you have water coming through the roof; what is really needed is replacement tiles.
De Grey, of Cambridge University, sticks out in a gathering of gerontologists, not just because of his distinctive long brown beard, but because he was originally a software engineer and came late to biology.
He has developed an approach that aims to combine such biotechnologies as stem-cell transplants and genetic engineering to reverse ageing in mice “within ten years” and in humans “rapidly thereafter”.
Continuing with the building metaphor, de Grey sees faulty garbage disposal as a cause of ageing. Leftovers from the fats and proteins that our cells handle daily are normally broken down and carted off by the cell’s own binmen, known as lysosomes.
But inevitably some of the leftovers are missed. The resulting build-up can cause disease. To clear them out, de Grey proposes boosting the clean-up squad with powerful new enzymes that he expects to find in soil bacteria that degrade all organic matter.
“By the time we have identified the enzymes in bacteria capable of degrading lysosomal junk,” de Grey asserts confidently, “gene therapy will be sufficiently advanced to allow their use in humans.” He is even more confident about the march of science when it comes to dealing with cancer. Malignant cells need an enzyme called telomerase, that effectively allows them to replicate indefinitely. From an engineering viewpoint the answer is obvious: immediately after conception you delete all the genes that encode for telomerase. No telomerase, no cancer. It is true that for survival you need to replenish telomerase in organs with a fast turnover of cells, such as blood, skin and the guts, so you use stem-cell technology to grow renewed ones outside the body and then infuse them periodically.
“Ageing is a barbaric, uncivilised phenomenon that should not be tolerated in polite society,” de Grey says.
Whether treating the body as a computer with faulty hardware that needs upgrading provides a civilised solution is debatable. It might even come under the heading of “outrageous or exaggerated claims”.
But perhaps some of the supposed miseries of old age are not as bad as we expect. We assume that old age and decline in mental skills and memory go hand in hand. But the latest thinking, as described in Science, is that oldies are better than the young at some mental tasks. They handle social situations better, have greater verbal skills and are more accurate judges of character.
What is more, tests show that simply reading an article that says your memory skills are still largely intact can improve performance by 20 to 30 per cent.
So, cheer up, you may have already turned back the clock.
Jerome Burne is editor of Medicine Today
