So You Think You Know: Raging Hormones

In the war on drugs, Human Growth Hormone (HGH) - a performance enhancer whose use stretches back over thirty years - is the weapon of choice for athletes who seek pharmaceutical help to increase their level of performance. The hormone was originally developed to help AIDs victims retain their muscle mass and to stimulate growth in children who had severe limitations in their bodies.

What are hormones and what do they do?
Put simply, hormones are chemical messengers that deliver signals from one part of the body to another. Like all hormones, HGH occurs naturally inside the body and is produced in the pituitary gland.

So what are the advantages of such a substance?
HGH operates anabolically, meaning it produces muscle. However, its effects are different to conventional steroids in that rather than enlarge muscular cells (hypertrophy) as products like Dianabol - the first commercially available steroid - do, HGH stimulates increased rates of cell division (by getting the body to make more insulin growth factor 1 or IGF1 which directly contributes to muscular expansion). In essence, it literally builds more muscle tissue rather than simply enlarging what you already have. Athletes such as Ben Johnson used a combination of both of these drugs with the hope of adding hypertrophy to already HGH increased muscles, although the evidence of this effect actually occurring is sketchy at best.

HGH is also used by athletes whose performances have reached a plateau. Even with performance enhancing steroids, they have made the most of the muscle they already have and HGH gives them more muscles tissue to use. Another physical benefit is that HGH seems to promote fat reduction, something that has been seized upon by a diet hungry media as well as its mooted anti-aging effects. Scientists have found that the levels of growth hormone in the human body decreases as they get older, by injecting HGH into somebody it slows down some age related diseases such as the ‘shrinking’ effect.

Anabolic steroids suppress the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal axis - the system made up of the Hypothalamus, the Pituitary gland and the Gonads - which controls hormonal activity to do with the immune and reproductive systems. Its suppression can have serious health consequences, such as heart problems and liver disease. HGH however does not act upon this and as a result users do not need to cycle on and off the drug and can take it continuously for as long as they like. Indeed studies have shown that noticeable effects of HGH only begin to take place after two months of continuous use.

Perhaps most importantly though is the fact that there is still no definitive test for exogenous (externally produced of the body) growth hormone. In 2004 WADA (World Anti-Doping Agency) commissioned a study into human growth hormones effect as a performance enhancer and to investigate possible tests for it using 'genetic expression patterns'. A genetic expression pattern is the activation of genes within specific tissues within specific times of an organism at specific times during development. That is quite scientific, so imagine your cells as buildings and your genes as blueprints. The foundations for the building must be laid down before anything else can be built so the blueprints relating to the foundations are used first, then those for the walls, floors, roof and interiors are all used in a specific order or 'pattern'. Your genes construct your cells in much the same way. WADA scientists were looking at being able to predict the gene expression patterns of a clean athlete and comparing them to a HGH using subject. Did they find a difference and therefore discover a test?

Well sort of.

In February 2006, just before the winter Olympics, WADA was proud to announce they had developed a test for HGH. The press were quick to congratulate the scientists who had seemingly struck the cheats a decisive blow in the war on drugs. However, if we look closer this test is far from infallible for a few reasons. Firstly, the test is only effective if it is used on an athlete 20-30 hours after HGH has been injected, which when you consider tests have been developed that are so sensitive that they can detect tell tale signs of steroids a year and a half after they had been ingested by the subject, a little over a day window period is pretty poor. Secondly the test is only effective for synthetic (man made) HGH. This is where it gets hazy as sources inside the sport say that the synthetic brand is more popular than the natural source because once harvested from a dead body (grave robbing isn’t exactly a popular pastime so it is difficult to acquire on the black market) it does not store very well so keeping the continuing supply going is extremely difficult. So with all this Synthetic ‘rHGH’ floating around inside athletes you would think that with this new test hundreds of positives should follow, right? There has not been to date a single positive test for either variety of growth hormone with many scientists alleging it to have poor accuracy and natural flaws in how it is operated. Sorry guys, in the war on drugs the good guys it seems are firing blanks.

Is it hard to get hold of?
I was curious about how people went about obtaining Growth Hormone and its variants so in the course of my research I googled ‘rHGH’ (the ‘r’ stands for recombinant) and found the interesting site www.rajeun.net/buying.html. This in turn lead to a man called Ellis Troussier who assures all visitors to his part of cyberspace can buy human growth hormone and EPO legally from him and have it legally shipped to the UK for a cheap price, wonderful! There are dozens of similar sites advertising this and underlines just how easy it is to obtain these sorts of drugs.

The disadvantages.
These predominantly fall into two categories which are financial and medical. We will start with the one seemingly most important for athletes. HGH is phenomenally expensive, with a one-month supply costing upwards of $4,000 according to some sources whilst others maintain the usual price is $1 per IU. However when you consider that one convicted HGH user, Tim Montgomery, had earned $250,000 for running at the Grand Prix Final in Paris where he set the then 100m world record, just over $1300 a year is not very much for a highly successful elite athlete whose yearly income can run into the millions.

Medically a HGH user can run into some quite serious problems. Chief among these (but also by far the rarest) is a condition known as 'gigantism'. This can involve a skeletal thickening of the jaw bone and the fingers and toes. The actor Richard Kiel who played 'Jaws' in the James Bond films famously suffered with this affliction. Major organs can also become enlarged and blood pressure can be raised to dangerous levels, although definitive evidence to support these fears is lacking and experts maintain that a subject would have to take 100IU/day for 3 months in order to start experiencing these side effects. In addition to HGH, athletes use shots of insulin to stimulate muscle growth. This can cause diabetes or insulin resistance, which severely weakens the immune system.

Curiously though, ‘roid rage’ seems to be absent from those on HGH according to sources within bodybuilding. ‘Roid rage’ allegedly occurs from high levels of testosterone in the system and can provoke mood swings and aggression with anabolic steroids in particular conducive to the condition, hence the name. However clinically speaking the condition doesn’t seem to actually exist, tests with a placebo group and a steroid group found that those who were not on steroids proved the more aggressive.

The question of dosages has caused huge debates amongst the athletic and body building fraternity. Studies show that 8+ IU/day can produce water retention and joint pain, although with anything up to 4IU/day very little side effects have been discovered. Tellingly, during the 70’s and 80’s the Russians found that very low dosages proved most beneficial, typically only 1 or 2 IU/day. Current users however incorporate 2-4IU/day, a happy medium.

So who is on them?
We know Ben Johnson and Tim Montgomery were both on growth hormone by their own testimony and Victor Conte has said in an interview with ESPN Magazine that Marion Jones was one of the athletes he supplied with HGH,

“She (Jones) came to my room for a new piece of equipment I'd brought, a $1,000 NovoPen injector that looked like a Sharpie and can be used for human growth hormone. I needed to teach her how to use it. Marion wasn't the least bit nervous; she's always in control. She pulled the spandex of her bicycle shorts above her right thigh. She dialled up a dose of four-and-a-half units of growth hormone and injected it into her quadriceps”

Dwain Chambers, Kelli White and Chrystal Gaines among others have also been implicated by the head of BALCO and while none have tested positive for HGH, the evidence is out there and not only raises question marks about the athletes themselves but also training partners and coaches. In short, HGH is the drug of choice for many top athletes - and not just sprinters.

In 2003 many Australian distance runners left Said Aouita the Australian national coach due to him supposedly pushing HGH on his athletes in order to stay competitive within elite ranks. It seems the message is the same now as it was in the steroid fuelled 70’s and 80’s. Use or lose.

Credits
Editors: Luke Stott
Researchers: Luke Stott
pictures from: Sports Illustrated, Wikipedia
Other sources:
http://www.t-nation.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_growth_hormone
http://animalkits.haha.be/phpBB7/index.php
http://www.usatoday.com/sports/olympics/athens/track/2004-08-29-trevor-graham_x.htm
http://www.rajeun.net/buying.html
http://www.ergogenics.org/blc18.html