Year: 2001
Type: article
Abstract: Growth Hormone (GH): Stronger muscles, stronger bones It is well known that GH therapy of GH deficient children leads to a rapid increase in muscle mass. Hulthen et al. show that the reverse happens when GH therapy is stopped after final height is reached 1. Lean body mass decreased by about 10 % within two years after the discontinuation of GH treatment, whereas healthy age-matched controls (17 to 21 years old) kept increasing their lean body mass. Despite decreasing lean body mass in the GH deficient subjects, their muscle ‘strength ’ remained stable. However, this compared unfavorably with the increasing muscle strength of healthy individuals. You do not have to search far to find a solution to this problem. A paper by the same group of researchers in the same issue of JCEM 2 provides the expected answer: GH. They studied 21 patients with childhood-onset GH deficiency who now were 31 years old on average. GH therapy over five years was associated with an increase in lean body mass, muscle strength and bone mass. GH is a great target for research, because it has a confusing number of effects that wait to be disentangled. A popular approach is to inject GH, measure a handful of things and conclude that GH actions are complex (meaning that it is hard to make sense of the data). Forwood et al. used a more successful strategy 3. Two GH injections were given to rats at a 12 hour interval. One hour after the second injection, the rats ’ right tibiae were subjected to a single period of fourpoint bending and the bone response was measured by histomorphometry. GH had no effect on the non-loaded left tibiae and the mechanical stimulus on the right tibiae had no
Source: PubMed
Authors: J Rittweger, F Rauch
Institution: Freie Universität Berlin
Language: English
Subfield: Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2151865783