For reasons that are not totally clear, DHEA (dehyrdoepiandrosterone) has captured the public and scientific imagination as an anti-aging hormone. It has been characterized as the "mother hormone" — a precursor of all steroid hormones, which it is not — that honor belongs to pregnenolone (Figure 1). Yet DHEA has shown sufficient promise as the promised fountain of youth, for which man has endlessly searched, that we need to look at what we know about DHEA, as well as what it can and cannot do.

In 1947, Francis Albright, the father of modern endocrinology (the study of human hormones and hormone-producing glands) predicted that secretion of the male hormone, androgen, would fall with age. He suggested that this should be called the "adrenopause." Subsequently, numerous studies have reported that DHEA and its sulfated form decrease dramatically with age. As Figure 2 shows, DHEA levels drop by 20 to 30% over the lifespan.