Aging In The 21st Century

Steve Kroft Reports On The New Field Of Anti-Aging Medicine

(CBS) 
According to the Food and Drug Administration, there are very few approved uses for human growth hormone and they are listed on each product's label. The most common is "growth hormone deficiency," which is caused by disease or damage to the pituitary gland, and is thought to afflict only three out of every 10,000 adults.

If that's true, a lot of them seemed to be at the anti-aging convention.

All of this is particularly alarming to Dr. Shlomo Melmed, who literally wrote the book on human growth hormone. He says there are all sorts of reasons why its use is supposed to be carefully controlled.

"I would not take growth hormone because it's unsafe," Melmed says. "As a physician, I would certainly not recommend to my family or my patients that they take growth hormone unless they have a proven indication for pituitary damage."

Melmed, director of Cedars-Sinai Research Institute in Los Angeles, is one of the world’s leading researchers on human growth hormone, and president of the International Society of Endocrinology, which is the study of hormones.

"There's no study published which shows that growth hormone administration will prolong life in a controlled fashion. There is no controlled study which shows that growth hormone administration in the long term will benefit any of the frailties of old age," says Melmed.

He says the benefits of taking testosterone and human growth hormone are often temporary and largely cosmetic, while the potential side effects, which include "joint pain," "carpal tunnel syndrome," "diabetes," "high blood pressure" and "heart failure," are very real.

But Melmed's biggest concern is that human growth hormone could stimulate the growth of undetected cancer cells, such as prostate cancer in men over 50.

"It may well be that it's beneficial for us to have low growth hormones as we age," says Melmed.

Asked why, he says, "It may be protecting us from cancer and heart disease."

"If someone has a latent cancer, is there any way to diagnosis that before you begin administering human growth hormone?" Kroft asked.

"Unfortunately not," Melmed replied. "I would be very reluctant to pour fuel onto the fire of a cancer by adding a very powerful growth factor."

Melmed says the use of growth hormone bothers him. "It bothers me that people are prepared to spend so much money on a molecule which may be unsafe for them," he says.