Nature’s age-reversing, disease-fighting, sex-enhancing hormone

How do you view aging? Chances are, with the passing years, you imagine yourself growing weaker and progressively sicker. It’s time to discard this stereotype. The “inevitable” physical and mental decline that we have become accustomed to associating with aging need not occur.

From adolescence to ‘senescence’

Certainly we cannot stop aging altogether. The years will continue to pass, so will the decades. But, as they do, the transitions from our sixties to seventies and eighties to nineties, and even to our hundreds, will be no more eventful than was our passage from our twenties to thirties to forties. Each passing year, will leave its stamp of decay.

Scientists have considered the process of aging to be as inevitable as the passage of time itself. Today, the aging process is synonymous with “Senescence,” a dismal, discouraging medical term used by doctors to describe the physical and mental deterioration that we have grown to accept as part and parcel of aging. According to traditional view, aging is a downward spiral through a series of degenerative illnesses terminating in death. Physicians who care for aging patients tend to regard their patients as travelers on a one-way ticket, with each disease an unpleasant but unavoidable stop along the way. As one system breaks down after another, patients are referred to one specialist after another. Each specialist deals with his or her own small piece of the aging puzzle — trying to patch his piece up or replace it.

But these doctors, talented though they may be, do not view the puzzle or the patient as a whole. They aim to treat each symptom as it comes along. Their aim, to put it bluntly, is off the mark. We think that in addition to focusing on each symptom, we ought to be focusing on the underlying disease itself.

The aging clock in the brain

In the book, The Melatonin Miracle, authored by Dr. Walter Pierpaoli and Dr. William Regelson, identified the precise point in the brain that controls how we age — they call it the aging clock.

These men are revolutionizing the way we view aging. Walter Peirpaoli, M.D., Ph.D. is the director of the Biancalana-Masera Foundation for the Aged in Ancona, Italy and Dr. William Regelson, professor of the Medical College of Virginia, Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.

Dr. Regelson stated “Our research — which has been the focus of several international scientific conferences and which is described here in a nutshell has taught us that the pineal gland, a pea-sized structure embedded deep within our brains, is the key to understanding, and controlling, how we age. The pineal gland is a part of the body that, until recent years, has been little studied but long revered. For example, the Hindus attached mystical importance to the pineal, referring to it as the body’s “third eye,” and, in a sense, that’s what it is. The pineal gland, which contains pigment cells similar to those found in our eyes, is light-sensitive and reacts to periods of light and dark transmitted to it through our eyes. The pineal controls the body’s biological clock, the internal mechanism that tells us when it’s time to wake up. Scientists refer to this daily sleep/wake cycle as our circadian rhythm. The pineal exerts its control through a hormone called melatonin, which is produced primarily at night when we are asleep.”

Melatonin is instrumental in establishing our daily rhythms, from infancy on. Expectant mothers pass melatonin to their developing babies through the placenta. Although infants don’t manufacture their own supply of melatonin until their third or fourth day of life, melatonin is present in breast milk. Melatonin levels peak during childhood. During adolescence, melatonin levels drop, triggering a rise in other hormones, which in turn signal to the body that it is time to enter puberty. As we age, our melatonin levels continue to decrease, with the steepest decline occurring from about age fifty on. By age sixty, our pineal glands are producing half the amount of melatonin they did when we were twenty. Not so coincidentally, as melatonin levels drop, we begin to exhibit serious signs of aging.

Resetting ‘the clock’ to remain vigorous in our own entire life

In order to understand how to fix the aging clock, you need to know why the clock breaks in the first place. We consider this in greater detail later on, but an overview is helpful here. We humans are highly socialized animals who, unlike our wilder counterparts have evolved beyond the purely biological role that nature assigned us. We think and we dream, and we create and we pursue goals. As far as nature is concerned, however, we are here for one reason, and that is to reproduce. Consequently, when we reach a certain age and have, in theory or fact, reproduced, we are in nature’s eyes expendable. Nature is not concerned with our lifetime dreams and ambitions that we have yet to fulfill. This may sound harsh, but it is, if you think about it, perfectly logical, and it is true not only for humans, but for other animal species as well. Salmon, for example, die shortly after they spawn. The female octopus literally starves herself to death after she reproduces.

Melatonin is the key to “resetting” the clock. In animal studies at Dr. Pierpaoli’s Biancalana-Masera Foundation for the Aged in Ancona, Italy, he has shown that melatonin supplements, given at the right time, can stop and reverse the aging process. In one early study, he gave one group of old mice melatonin in their night drinking water, and compared their physical characteristics and behavior to an identical group of mice who did not get melatonin. Six months later, the untreated mice continued to show signs of aging — they developed patchy bald spots, they grew shriveled, they lost neuro-muscular coordination, they lost immune and thyroid responsiveness, and they slowed down until they all eventually died of cancer, which is the typical pattern of aging and death for this particular breed of mice. The melatonin-treated mice experienced a dramatically different fate. They seemed to “grow young,” practically overnight. Their fur grew thick lustrous, their bodies grew slim and supple, and their youthful motor activity returned. Tests showed that their immunity against disease had vastly improved. Their energy increased and much to our amazement, their sexual vigor was restored. What’s even more exciting is that the melatonin mice lived on average 30 percent longer than the untreated mice, which in human terms is a gain of about 20 or 25 years. Even more astounding was the fact that the melatonin mice did not succumb to the deadly cancer that invariably affects their breed.

Melatonin helps in the recovery from Parkinson’s disease

Dr. Pierpaoli has given melatonin to Emmy, his mother-in-law, since 1984, when she was 74, to help stave off the early symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, a common neurological disease among the elderly that can cause tremors and can make it difficult to perform such simple tasks as holding a teacup. Now, ten years later, she is sharp, active, and free of Parkinson’s symptoms. He believes that this is related to her melatonin treatments. Also, her skin is as smooth and practically wrinkle-free as it was a decade ago.

As word got out about his experiences with melatonin, and as more experiments began to document melatonin’s remarkable effects, many other researchers in the field of aging began to take melatonin as well. From these and other studies, it is determined that the aging process can be postponed, and even reversed, simply by restoring melatonin to youthful levels.

Newsweek cover stories

Bolstered by two Newsweek cover stories extolling its virtues, melatonin has become one hot hormone. Consumers are buying melatonin tablets by the billions, making the hormone one of the best-selling products of its kind. (It’s cheap too - about 10 cents a tablet.) Mercury Drugs sells 30 capsules of melatonin at P400.

Most people take melatonin for its sleep inducing effects. Granted, there’s a lot to be said about the benefits of deep, restorative slumber. But the hormone offers so much more than just a trendy new cure for insomnia, especially in the anti-aging arena.

We know, for example, that melatonin is a potent — perhaps the most potent — scavenger of those marauding molecules known as free radicals. It thwarts the cellular degeneration that leads to heart disease, cancer, and other debilitating health problems.

By 2006, this research involved the discovery of melatonin’s ability to reset the body’s biological clock, which determines how quickly we age. This breakthrough prompted the following observation from Russel Reiter, Ph.D., a cellular biologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, and co-author with Jo Robinson of Melatonin: Your Body’s Natural Wonder Drug.

Melatonin safety

The magic of melatonin is that it achieves its anti-aging effects without poisoning any of the body’s organs and systems in the process. The hormone fosters internal harmony rather than undermining it, as so many prescription and over-the-counter drugs do. With melatonin, there is no toxicity, no risk of dependency or overdose, no adverse reaction.

Dr. Pierpaoli, who takes melatonin regularly, prescribed it to hundreds of patients. Not once has he heard of a person having an adverse reaction to the hormone. Even 250 milligrams of melatonin, administered intravenously on a nightly basis, caused no short-term or long-term toxic reaction. Gram for gram, ordinary table salt is more toxic than melatonin.

In general, people seem to feel that melatonin works best when taken a half-hour before bedtime. If you have a serious illness of any kind — especially leukemia, lymphoma (cancer of the lymph tissue), an autoimmune disorder (in which immune cells attack healthy tissues), or major depression - you should consult a doctor before beginning melatonin supplementation.