• | Main Menu | Home | About Us | What's New | FAQ | Site Search | Contact Us | Books | Privacy Policy | •
So we are going to grow old. That is certain. Is it also certain that we
will grow old in exactly the same way that human beings have since
prehistoric times? As the Romans did, and the Greeks? As medieval kings
did, and as millionaires have done in spite of their millions? You know
what I mean. Frail. Our steps more hesitant. And in our hearts a
well-founded fear that any little elevation in the pavement or dip in the
road will send us sprawling. Tired, oh, so tired.
In spite of efforts to propagandize for the golden years, old age has
really not been that pretty. Not in the past, and not even today with all
of our comforts. It has been said that youth is wasted on the young; well,
experience and money are often wasted on the old because they don't have
the energy to do anything with them.
Legal Status of HGH Adult
Deficiency
HGH: The Body of
Evidence
HGH: What You Should Know if You
Plan to Take It
Cautions about so-called Generic
HGH
An extensive list of scientific clinical studies
Growth Hormone Replacement
Found Safe for Long Term Use
What we now know is that much of
what is called old age is a deficiency state, much like a vitamin
deficiency. As we age, we develop age-related hormonal deficiencies. As a
physician, it startles and saddens me to consider all the thousands of
elderly patients who have come to me over the years suffering from the utter
depletion of old age. I was able to help many of them, no doubt about it.
But if I had known then what I know now, I could have done more. Nowadays,
using hormone replacement of age-related deficiencies, I
can do much more to improve their quality of life.
Unfortunately there are probably no more than a thousand or so physicians
in the United States at present who are routinely using HGH as part of
their
hormone replacement therapy—to rejuvenate the old by restoring normal levels
of this deficient hormone that is essential to life.
Can there be some danger in taking hormones? Should caution be exercised in
prescribing them? Yes, certainly. As you'll see, most of the hormones
discussed in this book do have at least some potential for causing harm to
at least some of the people who would otherwise be reasonable candidates
for taking them. It wouldn't be the smartest of moves to take human growth
hormone, or any other hormone without the guidance of a
knowledgeable physician—which is why they require a prescription from a
licensed health care practitioner. At the same time, when a prudent
approach guided by lab tests is used, it strikes me that no great abundance
of common sense is necessary to see that the danger for the average
eighty-year-old of sinking toward senility and death—or, at least, the
nursing home—is far more immediate and acute than the risk of side effects
from the judicious replacement of deficient hormones. By that I mean only
replacement of what is deficient, not pharmacological doses.
When Americans eventually come to realize that much of what we now call old age can be slowed,
and is to some extent even reversible, will they stand by and allow it to
remain unreversed? I wouldn't bet on it. They will want to maintain their
quality of life for as long as possible. I tell my patients that we cannot
stop the aging process, but we can slow it down and often reverse the
ravages of aging to a significant extent.
As a private citizen, I certainly don't intend to allow old age to creep up
on me any faster than absolutely necessary. As a doctor who has been
watching the hormone revolution take its baby steps during the past two decades,
I know that old age is not totally invincible. We have shot gaping holes in
it. We can not only slow the process of aging but we can also delay the
onset. I don't know whether Mother Nature approves, but even she is going
to have to adapt.
The next three chapters will discuss the most startling, really
awe-inspiring of all the replacement hormones: Human Growth Hormone (HGH).
It is also the most expensive, the most difficult to use, and one of the
most controversial. But very ordinary, healthy people are beginning to take
it purely to fight off old age. Let's look at one of them.
Tim Wallace:
Tim Wallace, a seventy-three-year-old businessman, is the managing partner
supervising the building of two hundred houses on a hundred rolling acres
in Virginia. When that enterprise began a year and a half previously, Tim
wondered if he had bitten off more than he could chew. His energy level had
been slowly sagging for about a decade. This would be his last big project.
Would he have the strength for it?
Said Tim, "I was full of enthusiasm, but pretty soon I had to admit I
wasn't the man I used to be. I'd work hard in the morning, but by afternoon
I'd be exhausted. Often I'd have to lie down on the office couch for an
hour or two and tell my secretary to hold my calls. I began to organize the
job around my fatigue. And it only got worse. After a couple of months, I
decided I was the most exhausted man alive."
I saw Tim in my office in June 1995 and suggested that he might want to try
human growth hormone (or HGH, as we'll often abbreviate it.) He had already
begun taking DHEA, which had produced some improvement—but not enough. Now,
I measured his blood levels of IGF-1 (Insulin-Like Growth Factor-1 is
abbreviated as IGF-1), a byproduct of growth hormone and the only practical
laboratory test to use as an indicator of growth hormone (HGH) secretion.
Tim's level at 110 ng/ml, although extremely low by the standards of a young adult, was
not surprising in a man his age. Soon after the tests were done, Tim began
taking self-administered injections one unit of of HGH four days each week. Two months passed, and he
noticed he had more energy. After he'd been on growth hormone replacement
therapy for four months he simply wasn't fatigued anymore. "It's pretty
amazing," Tim remarked some time later. "I have more muscle strength, in my
legs especially, and my body fat is shrinking. Now that I've been on growth
hormone for eight months, I find that when I squeeze the fat around my
abdomen, I can't get a handful. I need less sleep. But the greatest change
is simply what I suppose you'd call general vitality—I'm much stronger,
much more alive, I've got more energy now than I've had since my forties.
People who meet me for the first time can't believe it when I tell them my
age.
"You know, I don't think I'm going to retire after all."
I marvel at Tim's appearance, his energy, his youthful delight in what's
happening to him, and I marvel as well because I know I'm seeing a
phenomenon new to the human race: the years rolling backward. Tim has
bought himself extra years of vital life.
A SORT OF MIRACLE
Let's look again at the study conducted by Dr. Daniel Rudman at the Medical
College of Wisconsin, which I mentioned previously. Dr. Rudman
had been investigating HGH, which is the only hormone discussed in this
book that must be injected—a minor inconvenience in light of its benefits.
The needle is quite tiny (27 gauge), and an injection under the skin of the
abdomen or thigh is not particularly painful.
Dr. Rudman had been investigating human growth hormone for some years and
was already prominent in the field. He was about to become a bit of a
legend. He was aware of a number of medical studies showing that children,
rodents, and human adults who suffer from a deficiency in growth hormone
secretion tended to experience loss of lean body mass (muscle) and
expansion of adipose tissue (fat). They were weaker and fatter than they
ought to be. But when given replacement doses of growth hormone, these
alterations in body composition were readily reversed—in children, in rats,
and in full- grown, older men and women. More importantly, their overall
quality of life improved in many different areas.
Surely, Dr. Rudman reasoned, it could not be coincidence that these are
also the effects naturally produced by aging and in more or less direct
proportion to the decline of growth hormone that is simultaneously
occurring. Increasing fatigue, increased fat deposition, thinner skin,
and—invisible but crucial—shrinkage and decreasing functionality of major
internal organs all occur in the second half of life. In most people they
only occur progressively and to a significant extent after the age of forty, which is just
when HGH production begins to taper off more sharply. An average woman's
body is 35 percent fat at age thirty and 53 percent by the time she's
eighty. Similar changes occur in men, and in both sexes there's a
corresponding decline in muscle and overall vitality. It would be quite surprising if there were
not a causal connection between these changes and the decline of growth
hormone, since one thing that studies have definitely shown is that growth
hormone causes the breakdown of fat and promotes the synthesis of protein,
our bodies' major building block.
The building up of healthy tissue, especially lean tissue, is called
anabolism, and its destruction and eventual disintegration is called
catabolism. (The combination of anabolism and catabolism, along with all
the other chemical processes in the body, is called metabolism.) It is a
medical truism to say that the first half of life is anabolic and the
second half catabolic. What if a leading cause of this process was an
abundance of HGH from childhood until early adulthood and a progressive
deficiency from then on?
Rudman and his associates decided to take twenty-one healthy men from
sixty-one to eighty-one years of age with IGF-1 concentrations in the lower
30 percent of what's normal for a young adult and divide them into two
groups. Twelve men received three injections of growth hormone per week for
six months, and nine men received no treatment. Total weekly doses of HGH
were in a physiologic replacement range, approximately equal to what a young
adult produces normally. All the men remained
healthy. Nonetheless, the differences between the treated and untreated
groups after six months was startling. The twelve men on HGH increased the
amount lean tissue on their bodies by 8.8 percent and decreased their total
amount of fat by 14.4 percent. Their skin thickness increased 7.1 percent
and their vertebral bone density improved by 1.6 percent. The untreated men showed no
significant changes.
What had happened to these twelve men on growth hormone was also visible to
the naked eye. Physically, as best anyone could tell, these men had become
younger. I know that's a crude, seat-of-the-pants method of estimating age.
But isn't it what we all do when we first meet someone?
Standing in a bathing suit on the edge of the sea, many of the subjects of
Rudman's experiment now looked five to ten years younger than they had six
months before. Much of their flab was gone, their body contours were better
defined, they were altogether harder, leaner, younger looking specimens and their skin was
smoother and less wrinkled. Achieving this had required no exercise at all,
which is a clear contradiction of the normal route to good conditioning.
They had simply changed. Age had run effortlessly backward for them, just
as, in the normal process of life, age runs effortlessly forward.
Rudman published his results in July 1990 in the New England Journal of
Medicine, and like a time bomb, the possibility of a genuine reversal of
the aging process began to form in the minds of hundreds of scientists
around the globe. What was going on here?
We now know that these changes are not merely in outward appearance. Overall
quality of life improves, with faster healing of any type of injury,
fracture, or wound. Immunity and resistance to infection improve. Brain
function, memory retention and cognitive function improve. Heart and kidney
function improve. Depression and fatigue are reduced. Sex function improves.
And quality of sleep improves.
JUST WHAT IS GROWTH HORMONE?
Created in the anterior (frontal) portion of the pituitary gland, growth
hormone (HGH) is a small protein-like hormone (peptide) with a known
sequence of 191 amino acids. It is chemically rather similar to insulin,
although twice as large. Secreted periodically in very brief pulses,
especially during the early
hours of sleep, growth hormone remains in the circulatory system for only a
few minutes and is therefore difficult to measure directly. HGH is quickly
attracted to receptor sites on cells throughout the body. Some of it is
taken into the liver and converts some into IGF-1, another small peptide
hormone formerly referred to as "Somatomedin-C." IGF-1 is responsible for
some of the activity of growth hormone in the body. Moreover, since IGF-1
remains fairly constant in the circulatory system for twenty- four to
thirty-six hours and is more stable than growth hormone, a laboratory test
for its levels in the blood gives a more reliable indication of total
growth hormone production by the pituitary gland.
A normal level of IGF-1 in a young adult is approximately 300 nanograms per
milliliter or higher, abbreviated ng/ml—some laboratories use different
units of measurement such as "units.". Men and women older than fifty often have levels
ranging from 150 down to as low as 30 or less. Depending on body size and
also on how low their initial level was, one unit of growth hormone injected
on four days per weekly—one unit each time-taken on different days—will
usually bring those levels up to between 160 and 250. In older adults, when
levels stabilize close to 200 or more, patients report noticeable
alleviation of many of the "symptoms"
of aging.
Having said that, I must confess that, in practice, the interpretation of
IGF-1 measurements has had severe limitations. I always take a baseline
measurement to find out if pretreatment levels are acceptable or low. I advise
the occasional older patient whose levels are still adequate that HGH
replacement will not be worth the effort and expense. With the person whose
levels are very low, I have come to expect more rapid and dramatic clinical improvement.
However, I have found that follow-up measurements of IGF-1 often do not
correlate well with the clinical benefit received.
Frequently, patients who report great improvements on HGH do not show much
increase in IGF-1 levels. And not uncommonly, patients whose IGF-1 levels
increase substantially do not seem to experience correspondingly
benefits. This is probably because HGH has direct action on cells
independently of IGF-1 production. In some people, injected HGH does not
seem to increase IGF-1 as much as the frequent small pulses released internally
by the pituitary gland. Consequently, I no longer fully rely on routine
follow-up testing of IGF-1 after therapy has begun. Its effectiveness as a
guide to therapy is not nearly as great as a close and accurate observation
of actual physical and symptomatic improvements in the individual man or
woman being treated. The "gold standard" is response to a trial of therapy.
In other words, I treat the patient, not the laboratory report. The
pituitary gland of a young adult produces between 1½ and 2 units of HGH
daily. Much more than 1½ unit of HGH daily would therefore exceed a normal
physiologic replacement dose. When levels fall with age, the pituitary
continues to release smaller amounts. Replacement with 1 unit of HGH
(0.33 milligram), injected 4 days to 7 days per week now seems to make up
for the lost amount and be a
safe and effective dose. Side effects reported in the scientific literature
are almost non-existent at this dose, and are related to excessive doses.
Effects of Growth Hormone
During adolescence, when growth is most rapid, production of growth hormone
is also very high. However, once growth is complete, HGH must still be
present throughout life at the lower maintenance levels, represented by the
numbers above, to maintain physical and mental health and well-being.
Tissue repair, cell replacement, healing, organ integrity, bone strength,
brain function, enzyme production, immunity, resistance to infection,
overall quality of life, and integrity of hair, nails, and skin
all require the ongoing availability of adequate growth hormone. Without
such a supply, these anabolic processes are crippled.
In childhood, growth hormone controls a major miracle— growth itself.
Children with a pituitary deficiency of growth hormone are therefore
incapable of normal growth. And until HGH became available—first in small
amounts in the 1970s and then in unlimited quantities after 1985—such
children inevitably reached adulthood as dwarfs.
Once we reach adulthood and our growth stops, the secretion of growth
hormone begins to fall. For some decades, however, it remains at a level
sufficient to maintain a healthy adult body. It cannot be emphasized too
forcefully that the term "growth hormone" is misleading. Growth is only one
of the hormone's functions; "growth" hormone is an all-purpose maintenance
and repair hormone throughout life. It is absolutely essential for a high quality of life.
Unfortunately, its production declines inexorably as we age in almost
everyone. Eventually we
become flat-out deficient. No other word is appropriate. Averaged out over a
lifetime, the declines will be about 10 to 15 percent per decade. By the
age of sixty it is not uncommon to measure growth hormone decline of 75
percent or more from the abundant levels normally seen in
twenty-five-year-olds. By causing a significant reversal of the weakness
and frailty of age, Rudman's experiment—which has been repeated since by
other investigators—seems to confirm logical expectations. Without HGH we
cannot enjoy the physical strength of our earlier years; with it we are
suddenly and startlingly reinvested with physical power and a sizable
proportion of our youth-like vigor.
Won't Run on Empty
If the decline of growth hormone is so debilitating, what happens when
there's none at all? The most common cause of such a dead stop is a
pituitary tumor necessitating surgery.
In 1989, Douglas Harvill was a vigorous and relatively youthful
sixty-three-year-old Virginia businessman. He had no apparent health
problems until one day he was diagnosed with a malignant tumor on his
pituitary gland. The cancer was excised, along with the pituitary gland
itself. The operation was a success, and, following a short convalescence,
Harvill resumed his life. He was given hormonal replacements for all the
hormones for which the pituitary is responsible, with the exception of
growth hormone. That is the normal protocol in a case like his. Growth
hormone (largely through the efforts of the Food and Drug Administration)
was then carefully restricted in its use to growth hormone deficient
children. Doctors who wish to purchase HGH in the United States had been
forced to falsify written case records to the manufacturer, naming a child
to whom they allegedly intend to administer the hormone, and including growth charts
and blood-test results to confirm dwarfism caused by growth hormone
deficiency.
For Douglas Harvill, the result of this restriction by the FDA was that he
suddenly discovered what a colossal obstacle fatigue can be.
"I had no strength at all. For the first time that I could ever remember, I
hated to get up in the morning. I was sleeping an average of twelve hours a
night and then two or three hours after I woke I'd get so exhausted that I
had to go back to bed again. I was absolutely worthless. I'd always been
physically very active, but now I found that no matter how much I forced
myself to exercise I could build no muscle. Month by month and year by year
I was growing weaker."
Douglas began reading up on growth hormone and discovered that there were
European studies showing that average human survival after the removal of
the pituitary gland was only ten years. In older people it could be
considerably less with cardiovascular problems high amongst the causes of
mortality. He was determined to obtain growth hormone, but the obstacles in
his path at that time were considerable. Supplementation with HGH for
adults, even adults who were chronically deficient—or, in his case, totally
deprived—was not yet standard medical practice (and to some extent still
isn't). It took Douglas Harvill over two years, with my help and the
support of his endocrinologist, to get his supply of growth hormone.
The results for him were more dramatic than they would be for an ordinary
person.
"Within ten days after my first injection, my strength and endurance had
increased 50 percent. I could literally see myself recovering day by day. I
went to my endocrinologist and said, ‘You're going to think I'm making this
up.’ But he believed me. It only took a few months to gain back almost
everything I had lost over two years. My coordination and balance
dramatically improved. My muscles started coming back. All my energy and
vitality came
back. The difference was phenomenal.
This enormous improvement was achieved by administering just one unit of
growth hormone four to seven days per week.
Douglas Harvill is now sixty-nine years old and enjoying a retirement that
I suppose is not for everyone. Certainly it's different from our normal
image of old age.
Douglas had always wanted to ride a motorcycle. He now owns three
Harley-Davidsons and, in the cool of the morning, can more often than not
be found roaring along the twisty Shenandoah Valley roads.
It's What Gives You Vitality!
One of the striking things about HGH is its ability to produce improvements
in people who certainly haven't reached old age yet.
Consider Chad Strether, a Minnesota engineer who at fifty-six is still in
the midst of an outstandingly vigorous and energetic life. Chad runs three
or four times weekly and gets plenty of other forms of physical exercise.
He's something of a computer buff, a lover of classical music, and a man
whose wife still considers him a hunk. (So they both say.)
He should have no complaints, right? Well, he had a little one. Age was
creeping up, and he was tracking it because, being an engineer, he was a
man dedicated to precision, with a habit of keeping careful numerical
records. He had noticed two things about his running: it wasn't nearly as
much fun as it used to be, and he certainly wasn't doing it as well. His
times on his two and three mile runs were going steadily down. He'd also
noticed that now, when he ran two consecutive days, he did more poorly the
second day. It used to be that he did better. And, though he watched his
diet, slowly but surely, fifteen pounds of middle-aged spread had attached
itself to his middle.
Chad also felt that mentally he wasn't quite as sharp as he used to be.
Creative solutions didn't come as easily for engineering problems. He
wasn't as quick at games. And he didn't like any of this. In January 1996,
he found a doctor who prescribed him HGH. By the end of February, our
meticulous, record-keeping engineer was observing changes.
He
sensed that his balance and coordination had improved, and his running
regimen was no longer torture for his muscles. His home exercise routine
involves situps, pushups, and a series of rows on a rowing machine. Chad
times it with a stopwatch. His best time in the previous year had been 7
minutes 26 seconds. After five weeks of HGH, he hit 7:05, then 6:54, 6:42.
His weight fell eight pounds by April.
Chad also noticed that he played computer games more efficiently. (Yes, he
times that, too.) At the same time, his intuitive impression—hard to
measure exactly—was that he was becoming more creative in his work.
Chad was also excited by one other unexpected change. Classical music has
always been a big part of his life. Now when he goes to concerts, which he
does three or four times a month, he notices that, "I'm hearing high notes
that I haven't heard in years."
I'm impressed by these changes. If they don't seem as extensive as the
changes we've pointed out in older individuals that's because Chad was
actually in tip-top physical and mental state.
Let's look at one other example, this time in an even younger, but very
different man.
Ben Herzen, a New Jersey restaurateur and nightclub owner, started taking
growth hormone at the age of fifty-three simply because he noticed he
wasn't functioning any longer at the extraordinarily high level he was
accustomed to. Ben owns nine nightclubs, is a city council member, a
prominent figure in countless political organizations and charities, and a
man who has worked hard and played hard since before he was old enough to
vote. "How do you do it?" friends would ask him about his very active life.
Ben would smile and shrug.
Now, however, he was beginning to notice the natural signs of middle
age—the desire to sit at home with his feet up in front of the television
set was suddenly becoming greater than the urge to go out to dinner or make
it to that city council meeting. His hyperactive business life wasn't as
easy to handle as it used to be. One night on television he saw a program
that talked about human growth hormone and people who were going down to
Mexico to get it. Intrigued, Ben spoke to his doctor, had his blood levels
of IGF-1 checked, and eventually obtained a supply of HGH for his personal
use in this country.
He started taking it in March of 1995, and by June noticed that he was
starting to feel a little different. By September, he had no doubt at all
that something had happened. Such a gradual, progressive improvement during
the first six to twelve months of HGH therapy is not unusual.
Everything was just working better. It was as if something inside me was
different. When I took a vacation in Mexico last year all I wanted to do
was sit on the beach and read a book. This year I went out and swam for two
hours. I had gotten fifteen years of energy back. "My legs and arms work
better; I feel more coordinated; my muscles are hard again, and when I
spent an afternoon at a friend's swimming pool, he asked me if I had joined
a health club. I told him what I'd really done. I don't think growth
hormone is a miracle drug. It's just replacing what I'd lost. But that's
enough. I think everybody over fifty should be on growth hormone."
Should everyone over fifty be on growth hormone? In the present state of
our knowledge, I would never suggest that, and, there are some people who
do experience side effects. HGH is too potent to be taken incautiously,
indiscriminately, or without a physician's guidance, as if it were some
sort of an injectable aspirin. But I believe it's already clear that, taken
under the supervision of a physician, HGH is going to be the most
remarkable answer to aging that the human race has devised so far.
Are millions of people going to be taking it soon? The answer to that may
have been given by Edward Chein, M.D., of the Life Extension Foundation,
when he said to me that this was a "national security issue." By which he
meant that the U.S. government couldn't afford to let it be known that
growth hormone works for anything other than growth-deficient children.
Twenty million elderly people taking growth hormone at a cost of more than
$4,000 per person per annum represents $80 billion yearly added to the
nation's Medicare bill. If the Food and Drug Administration is violently
opposed to growth hormone use in adults, they have sound political reasons.
It now seems that our national health-care policy has degenerated to the
rationing of limited resources. At the moment, this country cannot afford
the fountain of youth. Translation: people who want it are going to have to
pay for it themselves.
THE WHOLE LINEUP
Okay, growth hormone is impressive, no doubt about it. Here are some of the
things that carefully conducted medical studies−most of them conducted in
the years since Dr. Daniel Rudman opened Pandora's box-have shown it
can do:
● Increases muscle
● Decreases fat
● Increases skin thickness
● Smoothes out skin wrinkles
● Improves exercise tolerance
● Reverses heart failure
● Improves pulmonary function in people with chronic lung disorders
● Increases restorative REM sleep
● Increases energy and endurance
● Protects mental function and appears to help in the treatment of
neurological and mental disorders such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's
diseases, and multiple sclerosis
● Enhances mental alertness and memory
● Increases the size of the thymus, the body's principal immune system
gland
● Increases natural killer cell lymphocyte activity, a measure of immune
system function
● Greatly increases longevity in animal studies
● Causes weight gain in frail elderly
● Causes some regrowth and regeneration of organs (liver, kidneys, and
spleen) that have shrunk with age
● Normalizes serum cholesterol levels
● Causes hair and nails to improve in strength and appearance
● Speeds healing after surgery and trauma
● Greatly improves the quality of life in AIDS patients
These are the effects of this natural hormone given to people at doses
calculated to replace age-related deficiency and maintain the body's supply
at levels normally present during young adulthood. The quantities used are
extraordinarily minute. A year's supply of growth hormone in concentrated
form would be smaller than an average vitamin C tablet.
Growth hormone may not be as explosive as enriched uranium, but its potency
within the human body is, I dare say, fully appropriate to the nuclear age.
HGH: The Body of
Evidence
HGH: if Your Plan to Take It
Copyright © 2012 Elmer M. Cranton, M.D., all rights reserved
Last modified: