Pros and Cons of Human Growth Hormone

The "drug du jour" is what Chuck Kimmel, president of the National Athletic Trainers’ Association, calls human growth hormone, otherwise knows as HGH, in this worrying piece in the New York Times' Play magazine. The worrying part is the number of people--the Journal of the American Medical Association says tens of thousands--who are taking HGH as anti-aging or “age management” therapy, despite some serious concerns about the hormone's safetly.
The Times reports that few clinical studies have looked at what happens when healthy people supplement their H.G.H. levels for sustained periods of time, but advocates point to one report in particular, from The New England Journal of Medicine in 1990. Twelve men in their 60’s and older were given injections of H.G.H. for six months. They received high doses, about double those given to adult patients with growth-hormone deficiency. At the end of the study, the men had a 14 percent decrease in body fat, an 8.8 percent increase in lean body mass and a 1.6 percent increase in the bone density of their spine, equivalent in magnitude, the authors concluded, “to the change incurred during 10 to 20 years of aging.”
That's the good news. The bads news, the Times tells us, is that doctors who recommend growth hormone tend to ignore an editorial that ran in the same issue of The Journal and that warned about the use of H.G.H. by healthy people. The editorial noted that H.G.H. can alter the body’s ability to metabolize carbohydrates, leading to blood-sugar imbalances and, in some cases, diabetes. It can cause bones to thicken, contributing to joint pain and severe arthritis. Amounts of H.G.H. even slightly beyond the normal range can result in high blood pressure, edema and, in the worst cases, congestive heart failure. In a later editorial, which cited a more recent study, The Journal added that healthy people who took extra doses of H.G.H. gained muscle mass, but they didn’t get stronger. Only those who lifted weights did. Several studies have linked high production levels of growth hormone to the development of prostate tumors and invasive breast cancer.
Bottom line: Geezer advises reading all of the Times' piece, and just saying "Thanks, but no thanks."