Well, I'm happy to report a shiny silver lining to this sudden barrage of Protandim-related marketing and nonsense - it has provoked the always worthwhile Jay Fox into writing another of his excellent blog-essays on the effectiveness of "anti-aging" therapies:

This discussion actually comes at a fortuitous time, because of an article recently written by renowned biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey. In his article, de Grey questions the idea of trying to measure the "rate of aging", since nearly all currently or hoped-to-be used methods of measuring the rate of aging are inherently flawed, and will essentially be useless in the long term.

I know you came here to read about Protandim, but let's digress a bit on a tangent related to measuring the effectiveness of so-called "anti-aging" pills: Gompertz Law. I promise it'll make sense, eventually...

It's well worth your time to read; hopefully it should help put the light and noise surrounding comparatively trivial items like Protandim into a better context. He makes many of the points that I was aiming for in my commentary on Protandim - namely that it's a drop in the bucket, and that chasing the drops is a bad idea when the same level of effort will eventually produce streams or rivers of progress in medical science, longevity and real anti-aging therapies.

So what should we make of Protandim? Well, to date, the only intervention (short of genetic manipulation) shown to significantly decrease the slope of the Gompertz Curve (and thus, likely add a lot of extra years to the lifespan of young people) is calorie restriction. Of all the other chemicals found to increase lifespan, most do so simply by shifting the Gompertz Curve down.

...

If all that Protandim can accomplish - and until long-term studies are carried out, the best we should hope for - is to shift the Gompertz Curve down, then an older person will see about as much benefit as a younger person: a modest, perhaps even small, absolute increase in remaining years before death.

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So if you have money to spend, and you're considering spending it on Protandim, please consider helping out a cause that will one day make aging itself a thing of the past. Please donate to the M Prize!

I couldn't have said it better myself.

Posted by Reason at June 4, 2005 12:05 AM | TrackBack (0)