Melatonin pills not a cure-all

KENT S. COLLINS

Q.The debit card receipts from the "pill store" are bigger than those from the grocery store. My wife is "addicted" to the endless search for supplements and gimmicks to act young and look younger. At night, she carries a serving tray to my bedside with a wine glass full of water (the expensive kind, out of a fancy plastic bottle), with some "energy pills" rolling around. She says the melatonin pills will keep me thin and healthy, young and energetic.

Is this good health for retired folks? --- R.M.

A. Only time and tests will tell. But retirees need to beware of the marketing of health-related products. The National Institute on Aging reported recently the melatonin you refer to isn't necessarily the cure-all hyped in the ads.

"Many advertisements target older people, and encourage them to take commercial melatonin preparations to restore levels lost with aging," the NIA report stated. "Older Americans who do, however, have responded to a false premise in the salesman's cry."

A study of older people at Harvard and the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston "found that nighttime melatonin levels did not differ significantly from those of 98 younger men."

That is significant because melatonin product advertisements claim the chemical --- which is thought to be a sleep inducer --- can be scarce in older people. Thus the logic of the ads goes like this: You are old; you produce less of this sleep-inducing brain chemical; and you would sleep more if you bought the super-duper melatonin pills.

Said Dr. Andrew Monjan, chief of the Neurobiology of Aging Branch at NIA: "Another thing not to overlook is that commercially available melatonin remains unstandardized, unregulated, is largely untested, is expensive, and we still do not know how safe it is for long-term use, especially for older people with a variety of health problems taking a number of drugs."

Los Angeles Times Syndicate

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