Still searching for fountains

From the August 19, 2009 edition of The Journal Record

The quest for eternal youth is nothing new. Just ask Ponce de Leon. Or Joan Rivers.

Since time immemorial, we’ve searched for ways to bring aging to a standstill. And while the mythical fountain still eludes us, the latest hopes for life extension are being pinned on experimental drugs undergoing clinical trials.

The drugs have their roots in experiments on caloric restriction. When researchers kept laboratory mice on a diet that was healthy but contained 30-percent fewer calories than a normal diet, the mice lived 30 to 40 percent longer.

This data generated interest but little excitement among us. The reason? Well, duh, cutting 1,000 calories a day from your diet (for the rest of your life!) verges on the impossible.

But these findings took on a new significance in recent years when this line of research coincided with work pointing to other ways in which the same biochemical pathways might be altered. In particular, researchers began looking for compounds that might achieve this same effect without dieting.

Talk about having your cake and eating it, too.

Not surprisingly, aging researchers have split on whether this approach holds promise. Nevertheless, several drugs premised on this approach have now entered clinical trials.

The best-known of these compounds is resveratrol, a chemical found in grape skins and red wine. Although the Internet is ripe with Web sites promoting unproven anti-aging pills made from this compound, a legitimate, FDA-approved clinical trial is under way for a special formulation of resveratrol.

Because the FDA does not consider aging to be a disease, the clinical testing is assessing the drug’s efficacy against diabetes and other diseases. This, in turn, leads to larger issues: Is there a distinction between disease and other byproducts of aging? And is aging something we really should be trying to “cure?”

These may be questions better posed to clerics, philosophers and medical ethicists.

Still, if you look back over the last century, you’ll find that we may not have cured aging, but we did a remarkably good job of extending human lives. From 1900 to 2000, the average life span went from 47 to 76 years.

This incredible improvement was due not to some “magic bullet” pill. Rather, it came from a series of fundamental medical advances – antibiotics, vaccinations, water and sewage treatment and anesthetics during surgery.

Will resveratrol and its brethren tack years onto our lives? Only time will tell.

In the meantime, we need to keep searching out every available pathway to improving human health. Chances are, those approaches also may prove key to extending our lives.

Stephen Prescott is president of the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation.

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