As the baby boomers march toward retirement, Botox, wrinkle fillers and hormones of various kinds have become big business. Medco’s latest drug trend report shows, for instance, that human growth hormone use grew almost 6 percent in 2007.

• The list for age-defying tactics is endless. Want six-pack abs?
• There’s a surgical procedure to create fake ones.
• How about drastically cutting your calorie intake to slow the aging process? There’s a group of die-hards that swears by it.

This search for eternal youthfulness certainly isn’t new. “In 1,500 B.C. people were ingesting tiger gonads to rejuvenate them,” says Dr. Gene Cohen, a George Washington University expert on aging.

But for a generation of adults who’ve been weaned on the modern marketing message — that for a price, you can have it all — the quest is taking on a new urgency.

There is, of course, much to be said for taking good care of yourself. Eating healthy and exercising your body and your brain regularly are considered tried-and-true tactics for staying young. Protecting yourself from harmful sun rays is another. Even flossing teeth is a habit that, according to research on people who live to 100, might extend life.

But that’s generally where the consensus ends.

• Many in mainstream medicine and elsewhere worry that we’re becoming too focused on treatments with short-term benefits that have potentially dangerous side effects and scant, if any, evidence that they’ll help in the long run.
• In doing so, they wonder if some people are actually jeopardizing their chance at a long, healthy life, both physically and emotionally.

“The quest to live forever and the desire to avoid diseases and not suffer” is understandable, says S. Jay Olshansky, a public health professor and longevity researcher at the university of Chicago, Illinois.

But it can make people vulnerable to far-fetched and potentially dangerous scams, he said, with some of the more bizarre including fetal cell injections, inhaling radon gas, even cutting off testicles, an ancient practice meant to reduce overexposure to reproductive hormones.

“There’s a large industry of people trying to sell to people what doesn’t yet exist and they’re making gobs of money doing it — much to the dismay of those of us who are vigilant about protecting public health,” he says.

There also are concerns that this obsession is sending the wrong message to younger generations.

Surveys from cosmetic surgery trade groups suggest that sizable numbers of people, even in their 20s, are getting cosmetic procedures.

And a fall 2007 survey from TRU, a research firm that specializes in the teenage demographic, found that a quarter of young people, 12 to 19 — and a third of girls in that age group — are interested in having cosmetic surgery to improve their appearance.

Michael Wood, vice president and director of syndicated research at TRU, was a bit startled by the results.

“There’s no doubt that the celebration of youth and looking younger has certainly accelerated in the last 10 years, five years even,” Wood says. “And this is a generation that’s growing up with that at a very young age.”

The effect has been palpable, says Neil Howe, a respected generational expert who has written extensively about “millennials,” young people who are coming of age in this century.

“I guess even young isn’t enough anymore,” Howe says. “It’s got to be ‘perfect’ young.”

THAT SAYS IT ALL.

Source: AP