The outbreak of meningitis that has claimed 11 lives so far has brought to light a little-understood segment of the pharmaceutical industry: compounding pharmacies, which make their own concoctions of medicines and sell them directly to the public. The steroid-based back pain drug that has been linked to...

When singer Michael Feinstein lost his 20-year-old cousin, Ben, to gastric cancer in 2010, he wanted to draw on his celebrity to bring attention to the disease, which is relatively rare and therefore doesn't garner the attention of more common forms of cancer. "Seeing...

Mice that ran on a treadmill a few times a week for five months fended off premature aging in nearly every organ of their bodies, according to a study published on February 21, 2011 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It's one of the strongest...

Another day, another anti-aging phenom.

The newest supplement to catch the fancy of folks who refuse to get old is astaxanthin, an antioxidant found in algae. Astaxanthin (pronounced as-ta-ZAN-thin) is the compound that gives salmon and flamingos their pink hue. Proponents...

Everyone knows that exercise is good for their health and longevity, but so few of us are willing to get off our butts and actually do it. According to a 2009 Roper poll, only one in four Americans can manage to squeeze in a half-hour of exercise five times a...

In 1990, a scientist at the Medical College of Wisconsin named Daniel Rudman published a study that gave birth to the modern anti-aging movement. Rudman's paper, which was published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that 12 men who were given injections of human growth hormone...

The always fascinating world of anti-aging medicine saw its share of scandals, scientific discoveries, and yes, Suzanne Somers in 2010. Here are my picks for the most newsworthy moments in the never-ending quest to stay forever young.

On December 13, researchers at the University of California at San Francisco said they had identified a derivative of thalidomide that seems to rejuvenate the immune systems of aging people. When they tested the drug in small doses on cell cultures taken from 13 patients, it stimulated the production of...

On December 2, pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline quietly halted a clinical trial of SRT501, a concentrated form of resveratrol, which is the much-hyped substance found in red wine grapes.

The reason this matters is that SRT501 had been one of the most closely watched molecules in the Big Pharma pipeline...

On Nov. 28, a group of Harvard University researchers published results from a tantalizing study in the online edition of the journal Nature. Their experiment involved mice who were genetically engineered to lack telomerase -- an enzyme that maintains protective DNA caps on the end of chromosomes. People...

I initially groaned when I saw the headline "An Anti-Aging Thanksgiving Feast!" on the website, Stop Aging Now. But while it's a bit far-fetched to suggest chowing down on a Thanksgiving feast will make you younger, I can definitely get on board with some of the

What is it about centenarians that gives them the gift of extraordinarily long lives? On Nov. 1, Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York launched a website, www.superagers.com, which tracks one scientist's decade-long quest to answer that question. Dr. Nir Barzilai, director of the college's Institute for...

A few years ago, former "Three's Company" star Suzanne Somers embarked on a new career: She became a proponent of bioidentical hormones, which she describes as safe and natural therapies for menopausal women. She wrote three bestselling books on the topic, "The Sexy Years," "Ageless" and "Breakthrough." And to cap...

That headline got your attention, didn't it? It caught my eye, too, especially when I saw the words "anti-aging ice cream" on the websites of well-known journalism outlets like Allure Magazine and Fox New York. This so-called news emanated from a deal that consumer-products giant Unilever...

Way back in January 2009, the Better Business Bureau issued a warning to consumers to beware of online offers for free trials of acai berry--one of the many products sold on the Web that purports to promote weight loss and halt aging. Turns out many of the so-called free trials...

An academic study with a provocative title landed in my inbox the other day. It's called "Deal or No Deal: Hormones and the Mergers and Acquisitions Game," and in it, two finance professors from the University of British Columbia argue that CEOs with high testosterone levels are likely to act...