Selling longer life — or snake oil?

Brian Alexander • E-mail

In 1931, Dr. Paul Niehans opened Clinic La Prairie in Clarens, Switzerland. There he experimented with something he called “cellular therapy.” By injecting human patients with the living cells of fetal sheep, he promised, people could be rejuvenated, their body’s tissues literally made young again.

La Prairie quickly gained an elite clientele. Actress Gloria Swanson, the King of Morocco, Saudi Arabia’s founder King Ibn Saud, Pope Pius XII and many wealthy Americans and Europeans flocked to Clarens for the treatments, buying into one of the most ancient hopes of man — restored youth. Niehans had joined a long line of would-be saviors who came before and after. Some transplanted monkey, dog or goat testicles into men, or their ovaries into women. Others touted various elixirs, like one called Gerovital, popular in the 1950s. In the 1980s and early 1990s, hopes were placed on dietary supplements like beta-carotene, often in massive amounts. Nothing worked.

But not surprisingly, lots of people keep trying. According to the Freedonia Group, a Cleveland, Ohio-based market research firm, the market for anti-aging products exceeds $20 billion per year — and is growing at a rate of nearly 9 percent annually. Whether consumers are getting their money's worth, though, is still highly questionable.

Indeed, there is no better place to witness the truism of the phrase “hope springs eternal” — and perhaps “there’s a sucker born every minute” — than an anti-aging convention, especially on the trade show floor where the latest products and services are hawked.

At the 15^th Annual World Congress on Anti-Aging and Regenerative Biomedical Technologies in Las Vegas, held under the auspices of the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine (A4M), dozens of businesses set up displays to market everything from horny goat weed dietary supplements to wands containing dirt that supposedly align water molecules so the H2O will get into your cells. Many of the products and services attempt to capitalize on recent science buzzwords. Terms like “stem cells,” “growth hormone,” “nanotechnology” and “regenerative medicine” were flung about, but mostly it was a case of putting old wine in new skins.

“ADULT STEM CELLS are the BEST-KEPT SECRET in today’s wellness…” boasted a flyer for a dietary supplement called VitalStem. Take it and increase “the number of circulating stem cells in your body.” Not only can it “replace diseased cells with healthy cells” and provide “anti-inflammatory and immune system support” but also give users “mental clarity and mood elevation.”

But the products are really just a repackaging of a supplement that has been marketed aggressively since the 1980s, a form of blue-green algae called aphanizomenon flos-aquae. The science behind the claimed benefits for aphanizomenon is slight — whether the claim is for immune boosting as it was 20 years ago, or stem-cell enhancement as it is today. In fact, there has long been concern about the presence of toxins in blue-green algae products, though you wouldn’t know it from the marketers at the trade show.

Banking on a long future
Often, marketers use confusion over science news to their advantage. Stem cells are a good example. A new business has cropped up in the field of anti-aging, the storing of customers’ own (also called autologous) stem cells for some hypothetical future use, either to regenerate organs or to treat dreaded diseases. NeoStem and BioBancUSA, companies that take blood from customers and store cells, were both at the show.

But the stem cells the companies refer to are not the stem cells you’ve heard so much about — embryonic stem cells. And they are not the so-called “adult stem cells” found in niches within the body. They are blood stem cells. Though the companies accurately state that such cells are used in the treatment of some diseases, doctors are often loathe to use autologous cells in a treatment for, say, leukemia, because the cells may contain the abnormalities that caused the disease in the first place.

Yet the come-on sounds so reasonable you can feel foolish for not packing away a few cells for that day when your kidney explodes. Even if the hoped-for future uses are pure speculation, who knows, right? So why not pay BioBanc $1,795 for the processing and $150 per year for the storage?

Sex was another popular enticement at the A4M show. Aging slows down libido and creates havoc with our genitals. So the trade-show floor was filled with purported sex-boosters. There were growth-hormone-releasing agents of dubious efficacy, plant extracts, tonics.

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