Huge Benefits From Growth Hormone

Human Growth Hormone (HGH) does wonders to help you feel younger, more energized and leaner while strengthening your libido, muscles and bones. HGH is one of the best “feel good” hormones you can get, if you can get a prescription for it. Few physicians specializing in anti-aging will test your levels and prescribe it. It is difficult to get, but it produces enviable benefits.

Growth Hormone Functions

We need growth hormone to maintain muscle size and strength as adults. It slims the stomach, helps keep skin looking young and keeps wrinkles from forming. It even reduces the risk of heart disease. Thierry Hertoghe, M.D., from Belgium describes the characteristics of HGH deficiency:

• Thin or limp hair.
• Droopy eyelids or cheeks.
• A sagging face.
• Thin lips and jaw.
• Receding gums.
• Large, deep wrinkles.
• Thin, dehydrated skin.
• Sagging triceps.
• Jiggly inner thighs.
• Loose-hanging muscles.
• Weak bones.
• Men with overhanging flabby belly and feminine breasts.

Mood And Personality

What Dr. Hertoghe describes about mood and personality in low HGH states is very interesting, too. These characteristics are often seen in the general population and may be linked to other problems. But low HGH certainly contributes to:

• Negative attitude.
• Insecurity.
• Low self-esteem.
• Fatigue.
• Depression.
• Difficulty controlling emotions.
• Long recovery needed after emotional upset.
• Low resistance to stress.
• Difficulty in asserting yourself.
• Feelings of incompetence.
• Wanting social isolation often.

Controversial Use Of HGH

Unfortunately, there is a definite ongoing controversy about the use of HGH in clinical care. The Food and Drug Administration and many state medical boards (which can take away the license of your doctor) believe physicians should prescribe HGH only for clearly defined abnormal conditions of HGH deficiency. Actually, growth hormone deficiency in adults is rare. It is classically caused by a pituitary tumor (adenoma), resection of the pituitary or radiation therapy that has damaged the pituitary gland. Synthetic human growth hormone (HGH) is approved to treat adults who have one of these true growth hormone deficiencies or such severe cases as muscle wasting because of HIV infection.

Hormonal Decline

Why are we told that HGH should not be used to reverse the normal and expected decline in growth hormone due to aging, or for those of us who want to look and feel younger and prevent disease? And who determines the correct cutoff level to classify as “deficient?”

Anti-aging and wellness physicians view the use of HGH very differently than the allopathic medical world. With HGH, we can prevent illness, reverse the progress toward inflammatory chronic diseases and keep people feeling younger for longer.

I feel HGH supplementation should be used as long as we are watching for — and can prevent or reverse — adverse effects from this hormone. From limited studies and many clinical reports, we know the almost magical health benefits of injectable HGH:

• Promotes new protein synthesis for muscle recovery or repair and to build new muscle.
• Increases lean muscle mass and, thereby, reduces fat.
• Improves REM (rapid eye movement) sleep stage, which best restores your energy.
• Reinvigorates your sexual drive and performance.
• In combination with testosterone, gives dramatic muscle-building and -toning effects.
• Improves bone density.
• Lowers cardiovascular risk.
• Makes you more assertive, decisive and calm.
• Improves memory, focus and mental sharpness.
• Diminishes wrinkles and age spots.
• Makes skin firmer and smoother.
• Strengthens nails.
• Can restore natural youthful hair color.
• Lowers cholesterol.
• Improves vision.
• Strengthens your immune system.

Benefits

In older healthy men there are many benefits to HGH supplementation. In 1997, a study [1] of men ages 55 to 71 showed significant improvement in several health parameters using a GHRH (growth hormone-releasing hormone) analogue over a four-month time period. Subjects self-injected a modest dose each night, resulting in raised blood level of HGH (and IGF-1), increased skin thickness, increased lean body mass, improved insulin sensitivity, improved libido and significantly improved general well-being.

Fortunately, leading and prominent anti-aging physicians support its use. In the New England Journal of Medicine [2], Daniel Rudman, M.D., wrote: “The effects of six months of human growth hormone on lean body mass and adipose-tissue were equivalent in magnitude to the changes incurred during 10-20 years of aging.”

Dr. Ronald Klatz, former president of the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine, wrote in his book [3] about HGH: “Growth hormone is the only anti-aging treatment known that actually makes people look younger. Even creams and lotions that contain antioxidants like vitamins E, A, or C, retinoic acid, or fruit acids… do not stop the skin from sagging and sinking. Growth hormone therapy can take a decade or more off your face.”

HGH Safety

If you use HGH for too long or at too high a dose, you’ll run the risk of the obvious problem known as acromegaly, an irreversible overgrowth of bones and muscles. Acromegaly naturally ensues when a pituitary tumor secretes very high amounts of HGH for years. There are cautions by anti-aging clinicians, however, that HGH use can produce a shiny plastic-skin appearance in 20 years of continuous use even at physiological replacement doses. Intermittent use is the best way to avoid this effect.

Other things to watch out for include increases in blood insulin concentrations with HGH injection therapy that boost your risk of type 2 diabetes (and must be considered). Have your doctor check your HbA1c level before and after three to six months of treatment. The helpfulness of monitoring the IGF-1 response to HGH treatment (we use IGF-1 as a measure of HGH in the blood) in order to help predict long-term safety, however, has not been proven. [4] Even after brain irradiation for brain cancer and a relative immune weakness, long-term safety of HGH therapy has been established for tumor recurrence with longer than 14 years of follow-up. (This study was reported in the Journal of Endocrinology and Metabolism in 2011.[5])

Two other long-term studies [6] described in the Life Extension Foundation online manual are large studies showing no increased risk for new cancer or diabetes in HGH-deficient adults getting physiological replacement doses of HGH therapy. Pfizer’s Genotropin (HGH) study in 2003 gathered 40,000 patient-years of data that showed HGH replacement does not increase your risk for new cancer or diabetes mellitus. By 2009, Pfizer reported in the European Journal of Endocrinology that its analysis of more than 60,000 patient-years of data demonstrated that HGH had dramatically improved the quality of life of these adults who had been suffering growth hormone deficiency. The same safety profile should apply to adults given HGH who are only moderately deficient in order to restore levels to the normal youthful range.