No Miracle in Human Growth Hormone : Health: Study fits a pattern that indicates supplements do not help athlete become stronger.

WASHINGTON — Human growth hormone is not the muscle-building miracle drug some athletes had hoped, researchers say.

The supplements may just make them retain water, said researcher Kevin E. Yarasheski of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

His study, in the American Physiological Society’s Journal of Applied Physiology, is among the latest to look at genetically engineered hormone supplements.

In normal conditions, growth hormone does what its name says--stimulate development. It helps muscles gain protein. And some earlier experiments had indicated supplementation would help people gain lean body mass, getting bigger without getting fatter, a sign they were gaining muscle. This led some athletes to try genetically engineered hormone, even though the supplements are banned in many sports.

But later work that focuses specifically on muscle development finds that supplements don’t help, Yarasheski said.

Yarasheski and his colleagues studied seven high-intensity, low-repetition weight trainers with an average age of 23, who had been working out for at least three years.

For 14 days, the men received synthetic growth hormone in dosages a bit above what their bodies would theoretically produce in a day. During the study, they continued their normal training. Researchers took blood and muscle samples before and after the period.

There was no overall increase in protein uptake in the skeletal muscle, indicating synthetic growth hormone wasn’t making any changes, the journal article said.

The study fits a pattern that indicates hormone supplements don’t help an athlete become stronger, Yarasheski said. Exactly why isn’t clear, but the body seems to have a way to control excess hormone, he said.

Increasing lean body mass, as shown in the earlier experiments, is not necessarily the same as adding muscle, Yarasheski said. It’s possible that supplements stimulate growth in organs such as the liver and kidney, and more likely that supplements make users retain water, he said.

The implication for weight trainers who buy synthetic growth hormone is clear, Yarasheski said. “They are wasting their money.”

Dr. Daniel Rudman, a growth hormone researcher at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, agrees: “For healthy athletes to take growth hormone as a medication is useless,” he said.

“A general principle in endocrinology is that too little causes one set of adverse effects, and too much causes another set,” Rudman said.

Too much growth hormone can lead to diabetes. In some cases, it also can create acromegaly--excessive bone growth that can deform the hands, feet and face.

Another expert accepts the conclusion that synthetic growth hormone does not increase muscle in the dosage given, but contends this does not predict what could happen if the drug is abused at higher doses.

However, Dr. Alan D. Rogol notes that the drug’s high cost will make it hard to abuse. The professor of pediatrics and pharmacology at the University of Virginia Health Sciences Center in Charlottesville treats children who lack growth hormone.

“You’re probably talking about $50,000 or more in an adult,” Rogol said. “That’s if they took a replacement dose (equal to what their body makes) for 50 weeks, and we think that would not do them any good.”