Steroid Sale Halted; Was Billed as Aid to Long Life

The Food and Drug Administration Tuesday ordered health food distributors nationwide to stop selling a steroid that is touted as an aid in prolonging life, improving sexual performance, controlling weight and preventing cancer.

The agency issued the order to 18 firms, six of them based in California, which must now submit information about how they manufacture and distribute the steroid, called DHEA.

The substance--which is described by distributors as a food product and not as a drug--was not reviewed by the FDA before it reached the market. But the FDA said that, because medical claims are made for it, DHEA is a drug and must be tested and approved by the agency as safe and effective, a process that could take several years.

Tuesday’s move is the latest in a series of recent actions involving the health food industry.

DHEA--or dehydroepiandrosterone--occurs naturally in the human body and can be manufactured from human urine, the FDA said. But health food manufacturers say that they obtain it from wild yams and the adrenal glands of cows.

FDA spokesman Bruce Brown said that, because there are no federal standards, there is no way of knowing whether products labeled as DHEA contain the substance at all.

Claims that DHEA can slow the aging process, control weight and prevent cancer apparently are based on work by Arthur Schwartz at Temple University Medical School in Philadelphia and other researchers, who have found that, under certain conditions, the substance has those effects in mice and rats.

But Schwartz, who had urged the FDA to ban over-the-counter sales of DHEA, stressed that those studies do not mean that the substance will have the same effects in humans.

No injuries have been linked to human use of the substance, but researchers have found that pure DHEA can increase levels of estrogen and cause potentially harmful or undesirable side effects.