Fight Aging!

Following up on a post from earlier this week, I thought I'd direct your attention to a discussion on the anti-aging hype of TA Sciences, TA-65 and Astragalus over at sci.life-extension. Many hands make light work, and the folk there have laid out a lot more of the background via additional resources.

Those are some interesting studies, but the most I can glean from them is that astragalus appears to have some antioxidant and immunomodulatory effects in vitro and possibly in vivo, according to a few articles published in some obscure Chinese med journals.

This of course is a far cry from being a "telomerase-inhibiting anti-aging supplement that improves skin quality and enhances male sexual function".

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http://www.tasciences.com/ta/blum.html

Did you see those p-values?? Almost *none* of them is statistically significant (i.e. p is less than or equal to 0.05)

There are some interesting trends, but this certainly doesn't cut it as far as scientific evidence.

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That plus what exactly was measured is not exactly well specified. There is a slightly more detailed version linked at the bottom but still...

My conclusion still stands, I think:

It reminds of the pitch for Protandim; a little piece of interesting scientific research stretched out thin as possible to cover a cartload of marketing for herbal compounds. ... So here we have the same old marketing nonsense, dressed up in flashy scientific clothing to give it the veneer of legitimacy. Same old attempts to adopt the form of science without the substance of science, the same old corrosive misinformation and look and feel games.

I can't see much good coming of this for Geron; this sort of partnership doesn't reflect well on a research company.

Technorati tags: anti-aging