Posted by Larry Hoover on April 30, 2005, at 19:28:52
In reply to Also found this:science jargon:Translation Larry?, posted by lotus on April 29, 2005, at 2:31:18
> I also found some other stuff on GH3,if anyone is interested in reading.
The last link first....
http://www.realgerovital.com/gerovital-gerovita-gh3-procaine1.htm#inthebeginning
Don't you just love the supposed before and after pictures of the old man, half-way down the page? Picture of man at 45. Picture of man at 70. Switch pictures....Anti-aging magic!
OK, back to the article.
A number of things jump out at me, in reviewing this article. First, the writer did not write it in English, originally. It is a poor translation, and the meaning is mangled in many places. It was also scanned into the computer using Optical Character Recognition software, which did not recognize the font used....lower case "L"'s are shown as number 1's, all over the place.
Anyway. The references to all the clinical trials are ancient. 30 years old, or more. We didn't even know how to do good clinical trials back then, so all data that old are immediately suspect.
In any case, every clinical trial reported used *injected* Gerovital, not oral pills. And, in an interesting quirk of fate, all the negative clinical trials were left out of this review. Pubmed has a number of published trials which showed no benefit of Gerovital. Pubmed is also full of articles detailing allergic reactions to this stuff, and cases of kidney failure. (Procaine is no longer used in modern medicine for a very good reason.)
The only modern references in the article are related to their supposed mechanism of action, not the pharmacology of Gerovital. (There is no real evidence for that mechanism, by the way, as the MAO inhibition studies were in vitro.) There is no evidence that *oral* Gerovital survives digestion and first-pass liver metabolism, in any case, let alone that it enters the brain intact.
This stuff is classic snake oil, in my perhaps not so humble opinion. That's not to say it doesn't have nutritive value. It is, apparently, a decent source of para-aminobenzoic acid (PABA), and diethylethanolamine (DEAE). If you want the former, eat yer veggies. If you want the latter, take some lecithin.
Because of the potential for allergic reaction, I think this stuff shouldn't even be on the market.
Lar
poster:Larry Hoover
thread:491319
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/alter/20050414/msgs/492052.html