perhaps I'm confused. Are you trying to return the values of the columns into vars with the column names? Or just into vars without having to execute a while loop?

my ($col1,$col2, $col3) = $dbh->selectrow_array("SELECT col1,col2,col3
+ FROM database where whatever='something' limit 1");
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or you could just use a hash

 $sth->execute();
 my $names = $sth->{NAME};
 while(my $r = $sth->fetchrow_hashref) {
     foreach my $name (@$names) {
          print "$name is $r->{$name}\n";
     }
 }
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