Endocrine Abstracts

There is widespread anecdotal evidence that GH has been misused by athletes for its anabolic and lipolytic properties since the early 1980s, at least a decade before GH was used therapeutically by adult endocrinologists. Since then a number of high profile athletes have admitted using GH. Despite its widespread abuse, there is debate about whether GH is ergogenic. Until recently most scientific studies have not shown a performance enhancing effect but most have employed an ina...

Growth hormone (GH) has profound anabolic effects on bone, but its use as a treatment for patients with osteoporosis has only resulted in small increases in BMD. The low serum IGF-I demonstrated in men with idiopathic osteoporosis may be important in the aetiology of this disease and has been attributed to GH hypo-secretion, though there are conflicting reports of this. Insensitivity to the actions of GH has also been suggested. We studied the GH-IGF-I axis in otherwise health...

Introduction: Using discriminant analysis, a method based on two growth hormone (GH) dependent markers, insulin-like growth factor-I (IGF-I) and pro-collagen type III N-terminal peptide (P-III-P) has been devised to detect exogenously administered GH. It is believed that GH is a popular substance of abuse amongst adolescent athletes. As previous studies on the detection of GH abuse involved predominantly adult athletes, it is necessary to validate the method in adolescent athl...