DHEA

DHEA can prevent or reverse the diseases that anti-aging experts like Orthomolecular Nutrition & Wellness have identified as the most prominent markers of accelerated aging: atherosclerosis (hardening and clogging of the arteries), cancer, diabetes, and reduced immunity.

What is DHEA?

DHEA (dehydroepiandrosterone) is an endogenous hormone (made in the human body), and secreted by the adrenal gland. DHEA serves as precursor to male and female sex hormones (androgens and estrogens). DHEA levels in the body begin to decrease after age 30, and are reported to be low in some people with anorexia, end-stage kidney disease, type 2 diabetes (non-insulin dependent diabetes), AIDS, adrenal insufficiency, and in the critically ill. DHEA levels may also be depleted by a number of drugs, including insulin, corticosteroids, opiates, and danazol.

There is sufficient evidence supporting the use of DHEA in the treatment of adrenal insufficiency, depression, induction of labor, and systemic lupus erythematosus.

The cascade of adrenal hormones starts with cholesterol, from which the brain hormone pregnenolone is made. Pregnenolone is then transformed into DHEA. And DHEA serves as the raw material from which all other important adrenal hormones--including the sex hormones estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone and the stress hormone cortisol--are synthesized.

DHEA is the most abundant hormone in your body. But production peaks at around age 20. From then on, your DHEA level decreases with age. By the time you reach 40, your body makes about half as much DHEA as it used to. By 65, output drops to 10 to 20 percent of optimum; by age 80, it plummets to less than 5 percent of optimum.

Because DHEA has such broad-spectrum effects, declining production makes itself known in every system, every organ, and every tissue of your body. The immune system is especially sensitive to diminishing DHEA output, opening the door not just to viruses, bacteria, and other microbes but also to free radicals and the Pandora's box of degenerative diseases they cause.

What's more, the collective indirect evidence from more than 5,000 published studies overwhelmingly supports DHEA's anti-aging role. Scientists now have proof that DHEA:

• Enhances immunity
• Decreases the risk of heart disease
• Defends against some cancers
• Improves blood sugar control, decreasing the risk of diabetes
• Reverses the age-accelerating effects of the stress hormone cortisol
• Prevents and reverses osteoporosis

Does DHEA rejuvenate immune function?

DHEA boosts antibody production; enhances the activity of monocytes, immune cells that attack cancer cells and viruses; activates natural killer cells, immune cells that attack and destroy viruses and other foreign invaders; and maximizes the anti-cancer function of immune cells known as T lymphocytes. In aging laboratory animals, DHEA restores youthful levels of cytokines (immune chemicals involved in protection and healing) and reduces the production of autoantibodies (antibodies that attack healthy tissues). When administered concurrently with a flu vaccine, DHEA dramatically improved the effectiveness of the vaccine in aging mice and in older humans.

DHEA's power to invigorate the immune system is closely linked to its potential to fight aging. Remember, heightened immunity translates directly into protection against oxidation, which in turn translates directly into protection against degenerative disease. So anything that strengthens your immune system also has the capacity to lengthen life. Immune deterioration with age is accompanied by increased incidence of atherosclerosis, autoimmune diseases, cancer, cataracts, and infections--all evidence of accelerated aging.

An important study conducted by leading DHEA researcher Samuel Yen, M.D., of the University of California, San Diego, underscores the hormone's age-opposing activation of immune function. After measuring baseline immune parameters in healthy older men (average age 63), Dr.Yen put the men on a program of 50 milligrams of DHEA per day. After 20 weeks, the men showed dramatic improvement in all markers of immune function, including an average of 45 percent increases in monocytes, 29 percent increases in antibody-making B lymphocytes, 20 percent increases in T lymphocyte activation, 40 percent increases in T lymphocyte anti-cancer response, and 22 to 37 percent increases in natural killer cells.

Perhaps most significant of all, DHEA increases production of insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1), a hormone like molecule that is used to measure levels of another potent anti-aging compound called human growth hormone (HGH).

How could any substance that protects us from virtually every major degenerative disease not protect us from aging as well?