Word: boned
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...real battle, then, is to prevent such fractures in the first place, and that involves slowing the onset of osteoporosis, a disease that makes bones brittle. Among menopausal women, estrogen-replacement therapy has gained wide usage, despite its risks of depression and endometrial cancer. A newer treatment that received federal approval just last year involves the use of amino-bisphosphonates, a class of drugs that inhibit the cells that govern bone loss...
...theory goes. Experiments involving restricted diets on primates have produced lower bone mass, a dangerous condition for older people. Moreover, because lab animals do not have the life-span of humans, all this remains highly speculative. Dr. Anna McCormick, chief of the biology section at the National Institute on Aging, cautions that cutting calories may never be an effective method of retarding age in humans. But, she says, "there may be a way to find a hormone or a drug that would have the same effect...
...oxygen radicals. The nia is supporting limited research into the risks and benefits of boosting the levels of three hormones that decrease as people age: melatonin, which affects sleep cycles; dehydroepiandrosterone, a product of the adrenal glands that converts to estrogen and testosterone; and human-growth hormone, which affects bone and organ development, as well as metabolic rate. Limited lab tests on animals suggest to some investigators that melatonin may serve as an antioxidant, wiping out the free radicals that can harm the body's cells. But scientists are cautious because results have not been repeated in additional animal studies...
Starzl acknowledges that this insight had also occurred to other researchers. Scientists, going back as far as 1960 Nobel prizewinner Peter Medawar, had come to recognize that tolerance was possible. If bone marrow, for instance, would only accept an interloping cell, the larger system would follow suit. The trouble was, the only way to achieve that was to kill off the body's entire current bone-marrow supply and replace it with another--a technique oncologists use as a last-ditch weapon to try to cleanse patients of such systemic cancers as leukemia and breast cancer...
...bone-marrow work and solid-organ transplant work have traditionally been two separate fields of medicine. "The big misconception," says Starzl, "was not realizing that the acceptance and tolerance of solid-organ grafts are due to the same mechanisms described by Medawar. There is a seamless work of transplantation immunology. It's so damn simple, it's crushing...