Centuries after Ponce de Leon visited Florida, scientists, not explorers, are searching for the fountain of youth. Ronald Klatz, M.D., president of the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine, says some technologies already allow us to reverse and prevent age-related diseases, and that anti-aging efforts will become part of our basic health concerns. Dr. Katz has written several books on the subject; excerpts of his ThirdAge interview follow.
ThirdAge: What exactly is anti-aging medicine?
Dr. Klatz: Basically, it's any technology that deals with the very early detection, prevention, treatment or reversal of aging related disease. It encompasses quite a wide variety of technologies -- everything from cholesterol screening, mammograms, nutritional therapies, sports, exercise rehabilitation, right on through the human genome project, genetic engineering, advanced diagnostic imaging with MRI, PET scanning, even robotic survey or brain surgery, I suppose.
ThirdAge: You write about the value of hormone replacement. Can you explain how that works?
Dr. Klatz: In my books "Hormones of Youth" and "Grow Young With HGH," I talked about the advantages of replacing deficient hormones that occur with aging. We're finding that the sex hormones especially -- but really all the hormones of the body -- turn out to be the pacemakers of aging to a very large extent. If we look at young people and old people from a physiological point of view, it's very hard to tell a lot of difference when we look at the cells under a microscope. But one of the really key differences between young people and old people is the amount of hormones and the quality of receptor sites to those hormones in those elderly individuals.
When we replace the missing hormones in older people -- replace them to the level of younger people -- a very exciting thing happens. Cells start to respond and actually grow younger in terms of their physiology and in terms of their function. So we're finding that just as when you give insulin to a diabetic, their metabolism improves drastically, so when we give estrogen to women who are postmenopausal, their metabolism improves drastically as well. They develop 50 percent fewer diseases of aging -- degenerative diseases -- across the board. I'm not just talking about less heart disease and osteoporosis, but less Parkinson's disease, less diabetes, even less Alzheimer's disease. Interestingly, we see an analogous situation when we give testosterone to aging men who are undergoing the andropause -- which is the male equivalent of female menopause. ThirdAge: How can anti-aging medicine help someone who is already beginning to suffer age-related health problems? Or is it too late for them? Dr. Klatz: No, no not at all. I mean, ideally, the time to start is when you're about 35 or maybe, ultimately when you're 25
