Baby boomers pay for six pack in a syringe

With his six-pack stomach, bulging chest and bull-like shoulders, the muscleman in the newspaper advertisement displays the sort of rippling torso that adorns the cover of men's fitness journals.

But there is one difference. From the neck up, Dr Jeffry S Life is a balding 67-year-old physician.

His physique is the product not of a computer touch-up but a controversial American "ageing management" technique, that often includes a cocktail of human growth hormones and testosterone.



Some 13,000 clients have so far spent thousands of dollars on a technique known as Cenegenics (from the Greek for "new beginning"). As post-war baby boomers enter their 60s, it promises to boost performance from the office to the gym to the bedroom.

The initial one-day $2,995 evaluation at the Cenegenics Medical Institute (CMI) in Las Vegas, has already attracted a handful of unnamed Britons seeking the secret of Dr Life's remarkable torso.

Cenegenics was the brainchild of Alan Mintz, a radiologist, whose own buffed body also used to be the best advertising for his business - until he died in June, aged 69, five years short of the average male American life expectancy.