LIVE BETTER AND LONGER WITH MIRACLE DRUG HGH!! It's the new sales pitch flooding our e-mail inboxes, promising everything from bulging biceps and washboard abs to greater sexual stamina. But there is one consistent promise – age reversal.

These sales pitches for Human Growth Hormone (HGH) are easy to come by; finding an authoritative voice of reason is more difficult.

There are no "magic potions, hormones, antioxidants, forms of genetic engineering or biomedical technologies that exist today that would permit a life expectancy of 120 or 150 years as some people have claimed," says aging expert S. Jay Olshansky of the University of Illinois, Chicago, in an Associated Press interview.

Leonard Hayflick, professor of anatomy at the University of California, San Francisco, has also refuted these claims, saying, "Superlongevity is simply not possible."

So what's behind the sudden push in "anti-aging" products bearing names like Regenesis Pro HGH, aeon, and Sol Biotropin? Taking what bodybuilders have used for years to the mass markets, marketers are pitching hormone injections to boomers as youth injections. Hundreds of clinics have opened in the U.S. over the last decade, pricing their injections at $10,000 a year or more. Lately promoters have started using e-mail marketing and e-commerce web sites to sell various forms of HGH.

The Effects of HGH

Their extravagant claims are based on some promising nuggets of truth. In clinical studies cited by the National Aging Institute's Huber Warner, patients reportedly gained muscle mass, lost fat, improved their mental acuity, increased their sex drive and developed more youthful looking skin through HGH therapy.

Now here's the not-so-good news. Not all patients observed these results. And those who did would need to continue with the therapies – at the price of $3,000 to $10,000 a year – to maintain the effects. No study has ever indicated HGH extends life, and animal studies suggest the reverse. Mice lacking growth hormone routinely live 30 to 50 percent longer than normal mice, and mice that overproduce growth hormone live 30 to 50 percent shorter, Warner said.

What's worse, a 2001 study conducted by Karoly Szepeshazi of the Tulane School of Medicine reported that growth hormone fuels cancer in mice. Apparently, HGH triggers the release of IGF-1, a hormone known to stimulate cancer growth later in life.

Other studies have showed a similar mix of positive, but also disturbing, results. A study funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on subjects over age 65 showed that some participants increased muscle and lost fat on HGH. But the same test group reported joint pains, carpal tunnel syndrome and glucose intolerance. Five of the women became diabetic.

The Natural Method

The "age reversal" marketers promote is actually improvements in biological measures such as handgrip strength, reflex time and blood flow. But these are indicators of health, not age, and can be boosted naturally through exercise and nutrition.

And that simple solution may be as close as we are today to a fountain of youth, according to Walter Bortz of Stanford University Medical School, past president of the American Geriatric Society.

"Much of what we think about aging is not aging but disuse," Bortz told The Washington Post. He compares "disuse" to a leg in a cast, which shrivels and looks older. Exercise can make the leg appear healthy again, though it can't make it "younger."