Editorial: Antiaging Medicine: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

HROUGHOUT the centuries, humans have looked for magical ways to extend the lifespan and improve the quality of old age. In the 13th century, Roger Bacon sug-gested that rejuvenation required good nutrition, regular ex-ercise, and receiving “the breath of a virgin ” (1). Many of the modern claims of the antiaging medicine gurus are, like Bacon’s virgin’s breath, unlikely to rejuvenate but are couched in pseudoscientific terminology to appeal to those desperate to find the mythical fountain of youth. The double Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling touted the antiaging effects of megadoses of vitamin C. Vitamin C is involved in multiple oxidation-reduction reactions. Despite the extraordinary zeal for the therapeutic properties of vita-min C, neither epidemiological nor intervention studies have demonstrated any major efficacy of this vitamin in pharmacological dose in being protective against athero-sclerotic disease or cancer (2). In addition, there is some ev-idence that vitamin C may produce oxidative damage to DNA, as levels of 8-oxoadenine are increased in persons taking vitamin C (3). Excess oxidative stress remains a major theory of aging (4). Experiments in the worm C. elegans have demonstrated that mutations that activate an antioxidant pathway prolong life