Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, July 12, 1990 TAG: 9007120417
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-14 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Still, there is much amazing and promising about a recent report in the New England Journal of Medicine. In a clinical trial, 21 men between 61 and 81 were injected with a manufactured growth hormone. After six months, all emerged with bodies that, by some measures, were almost 20 years younger than the ones they started out with.
According to the researchers, the subjects had shed nearly 15 percent of their body fat while gaining lean muscle mass. Bones in their spines thickened. Vital organs such as the heart and kidneys, which tend to shrink with age, were strengthened. And their skin had recovered a youthful thickness.
These sorts of well-publicized findings often prove less miraculous than the initial, exuberant announcement of them would suggest. In this case, results are very preliminary. Only a small number of men were tested. No women were tested at all. And there's no way of knowing yet the long-term effects. Nor are side effects, if any, yet known. With treatments that do not treat a disease, it's harder to justify potentially harmful side effects if they do occur.
If the treatment does prove successful, however, the possibilities are endless. Injections could aid old people recovering from broken bones, or whose muscles are wasting away. Eventually, they no doubt would be applied, too, as preventive medicine for the elderly whose bodies no longer produce the hormone in sufficient quantity.
Synthetic growth hormones won't prove a fountain of perpetual youth: It's doubtful they would affect humans' natural life span. And some may pose moral questions about a technique countering symptoms of aging that doesn't require strenuous exercise or strict diets. Surely this is too easy.
Maybe so. It's still, one hopes, a fantastic breakthrough.
by CNB