SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

It has long been established that after peaking at the end of puberty, the p roduction of dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) steadily declines with age and approaches levels of approximately 80% in the elderly (>75y). In the late 20th century, initial studies investigating the "anti-aging" effect of the adrenal hormone DHEA provided results that appeared to confirm the hypothesis that the restauration of DHEA to youthful levels would have beneficial cognitive and metabolic effects. Many of the findings could yet not be reproduced in follow-up studies and the pharmaceutical industry soon lost interest in spending money into research on a naturally occurring and thus non-patentable compound. Consequently, expensive long-term studies such as the one ( Weiss. 2011 ) recently been published in the medical journal AGING are scarce and thus well-worth being mentioned on the SuppVersity. Figure 1: Changes in Body Weight and Body Composition Before and After 12 months of ...

First of all, rats are not a particularly good model for DHEA metabolism in human beings. Nevertheless, the results of a study by Magyar et al. ( Magyar. 2010 ) would warrant further investigations into the effectiveness of high dose DHEA supplementation on total scavenger capacity and liver fat content in men. In the course of a 28 day intervention the scientists fed rats on either a normal or a high fat diet and supplemented their drinking water with no DHEA (Control), 400µg DHEA (DHEA) and 150µg DHEA-Sulfate (DHEA-S). Table 1: Fresh frozen liver fat content, SOD, catalase and GST activity results on Day 28 As the figures in Table 1 indicate both, DHEA and DHEA-S were able to reduce the negative effect of the high fat diet on liver fat content and oxidant status (as measured by SOD-, Catalase and GST activity). This is an interesting result, of which the scientists write: Our results support the hypothesis that DHEA and DHEAS supplementation can improve the antioxidant status ...