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Kinetin is a plant-growth hormone, and its technical
name is N6-furfuryladenine. What makes kinetin interesting
are the in vitro and animal studies demonstrating its
effect as a growth factor. Most of these studies were
conducted by Dr. Suresh I. S. Rattan, PhD, DSc, Associate
Professor of Biogerontology at the University of Aarhus,
Denmark, who happens to be the patent holder for N6-furfuryladenine
for use on aging skin. Rattan told me, "Normal cells,
as they divide and age, go through a progressive accumulation
of changes that are irreversible until they reach a stage
where they finally die. The in vitro form of creating
cellular aging is called the Hayflick Phenomenon, named
after the researcher who discovered this method of studying
cellular aging in a laboratory setting."
"...A young cell is plump, round, smooth. As the
cells age, they become irregular, flattened, and large,
full of debris…when you grow normal cells in the lab they
have a limited number of times they multiply and divide—termed
a cell's replicative life span. But when I added N6-furfuryladenine
to these cultures the cells did not age as fast, the process
slowed down dramatically…."
"Topically no one knows how or if N6-furfuryladenine
is being used by the cell... It has only been observed
for in vitro systems... We are curious about negative
effects... In cell cultures when a concentration of say
250 micromolars of N6-furfuryladenine was used, we got
good results, but when we used 500 micromolars of N6-furfuryladenine
the cells started dying."
I suspect that when it's applied topically, kinetin isn't
of much use to the skin cell, and even if it could be
utilized, there probably isn't enough kinetin in any product
to have a negative or positive impact but that is only
a guess, no one knows for sure (Source: Dermatologic Clinics,
October 2000, pages 609-615).
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