HGH for Longevity What the Human Studies Show
Most of the published research on human growth hormone is about kids with growth hormone deficiency. But there's a smaller body of work looking at HGH in adults for anti-aging, fat loss, recovery, and performance. I went through the studies. Here's what they actually say.
What HGH Is
HGH, sometimes called somatropin, is a peptide hormone made by your pituitary gland. It drives growth, cell reproduction, and regeneration.
Your natural production peaks in childhood and adolescence. After 30, it drops off pretty dramatically.
Synthetic recombinant HGH has been around for decades and is given by injection. In the anti-aging world, it's been treated like a holy grail. The data is more nuanced than that.
The Famous 1990 Rudman Study
In 1990, Dr. Daniel Rudman ran a six-month trial with 12 healthy men over 60 on HGH versus 9 untreated controls.
The HGH group gained lean mass, gained bone density, and lost fat. The authors noted these changes were equivalent in size to what 10 to 20 years of aging does in reverse. Six months of injections.
That study is what kicked off the public obsession with HGH for youth restoration.
What Followed
Studies in 1994 and 1996 showed small lean mass gains of a few kilograms, around 6 to 8 pounds, with little change in strength or endurance. That's a theme you'll see throughout this article. HGH does not really move strength.
The 2002 Blackman study, 26 weeks, 131 men and women aged 65 to 88. HGH alone increased lean mass and decreased fat in both sexes. In men, adding testosterone produced additive effects and slightly improved cardiovascular endurance.
A 2002 systematic review pooled 31 trials and around 500 participants. Average gain was about 2 kg of lean mass and 2 kg of fat loss. No significant improvement in bone density, aerobic capacity, cholesterol, or longevity markers.
So does it move the longevity needle directly? The data doesn't say yes. But more muscle and less fat are good for longevity, period.
The Side Effect Picture
In these anti-aging trials, 30 to 40 percent of participants had joint pain, swelling, edema, or carpal tunnel symptoms. Around 18 percent showed a trend toward insulin resistance. Men on HGH had higher rates of glucose intolerance versus controls.
Here's the thing. Most of this is dose dependent. These trials often used higher doses without controlling for diet, training, or testosterone status. At 1 to 2 IU per day, edema and water retention are pretty rare in my experience working with people.
Athletic Performance
HGH is banned in pro and Olympic sport. Athletes still use it. The placebo-controlled trials are pretty clear though.
A 2008 Stanford meta-analysis found about 4 to 5 pounds of lean mass gain on HGH, but most of it looked like fluid retention. No measurable strength gains. No VO2 max improvement.
The 2010 WADA study, 96 recreational athletes, 8 weeks, 2 mg per day (about 6 IU). HGH improved anaerobic sprint capacity 4 to 5 percent. HGH plus testosterone pushed it to 8 percent. That's about a 0.4 second improvement in a 10-second 100m dash. For a pro athlete, those tenths are worth millions.
But strength, power, jump height, endurance? No improvement.
So HGH is not turning a normal athlete into a better athlete in the short term. Where it probably helps elite athletes is recovery, sleep, and bouncing back from the beating their body takes.
Injury Recovery
This is where HGH actually shines.
Burn healing. A 2014 review of 13 RCTs and 701 patients found HGH sped up burn wound healing in adults by about 9 days on average. Skin graft donor sites healed 3 days faster. No increase in mortality or scarring. The downside was a 2.4x higher risk of hyperglycemia, which makes sense in critically ill patients who aren't moving. With modern tools like GLP-1s, metformin, or dihydroberberine, that's manageable.
Bone fractures. A 2007 multicenter RCT in 406 adults with tibial fractures used three doses of HGH, roughly 0.5, 1, and 2 IU equivalents. For closed fractures, the high-dose group healed in 95 days versus 129 days on placebo. That's a 26 percent reduction.
ACL recovery. A 2020 Michigan study with 19 young men, twice-daily HGH starting one week before surgery and continuing 6 weeks after. At 12 weeks post-op, the HGH group had 29 percent greater knee extensor strength than placebo. Muscle size was the same, but function was better.
If I had a burn, a fracture, or an ACL repair, I'd absolutely be using HGH.
Adult Growth Hormone Deficiency
This is where the strongest case lives.
GH deficiency in adults usually comes from pituitary issues. I want to share something personal here. I played football for 17 years. The same way concussions can suppress the HPTA and tank testosterone, I think the same thing happened to my growth hormone production. When I started HGH after I was already on TRT, the added benefit was clear. At 26 or 27, you'd think your natural GH would be high. Mine wasn't.
Symptoms of adult GH deficiency include increased visceral fat, low muscle, low energy, poor mood, bad lipids, low bone density, and higher cardiovascular risk.
The trial data on replacing GH in deficient adults is solid.
- 8 to 10 percent increase in lean mass, similar reduction in fat mass
- Improved exercise tolerance and VO2 max
- Around 5 percent increase in spinal bone density with long-term use
- Better lipid profile and cardio protection
- Improved quality of life
By 1997, consensus guidelines endorsed GH replacement in diagnosed deficient adults. The benefits are real and consistent.
How Do You Know If You're Deficient?
IGF-1 is a proxy. It's not perfect. Some people don't realize they're low until they actually supplement and feel the difference.
My rule of thumb. If 2 IU per day produces a marked change in fat loss, sleep, and recovery, you were probably deficient. If 2 IU does nothing for someone already in a good range, that tells you something too.
For me, 2 IU made a huge difference. My IGF-1 was around 150 to 180 in my mid-20s. Running it closer to 250 to 300, I feel a lot better.
Risk Versus Benefit by Population
High benefit. GH-deficient adults and elderly adults with low natural production.
Lower benefit. Healthy young adults and athletes looking for performance gains.
Worth considering. Therapeutic replacement at 1 to 2 IU for aging adults, especially over 50.
My Take
The mantra should be replacement, not enhancement. Eight IU per day long-term isn't smart for most people. One to two IU per day for an aging adult with declining levels is a different conversation entirely.
If you're 38 and feeling great, you probably don't need it. If you're over 50 or 55, I think GH should be a staple in an anti-aging protocol. The data on deficient adults is strong, and given the environmental load most people are carrying, more adults are walking around with suboptimal GH than we'd like to think.
For injury recovery, burns, fractures, ACL repairs, the case is even stronger. For pure athletic performance in healthy people, the data is weak outside of sprint capacity.
Use it to replace what you've lost. Not to chase something you never had.
Full transcript click any paragraph to jump video
Hey everybody, this is Hunter Williams. I hope you're doing amazing wherever you are at in the world. Today's video is going to be all about human growth hormone. And what I'm going be doing is examining some studies, some old, with some new, about Human Growth Hormone as it relates to anti-aging and longevity in adults. So most of the literature published around human Growth hormone is related to children and children that have Growth hormonal deficiency. If you start digging and pouring over literature, much of it is in that. However, there's still a little bit out there as it relates to adults using growth hormone for anti-aging, longevity, fat loss purposes.
So that's what today's video is going to be about. Not super sexy, but at the same time, I think it's cool because there are so many more research tools out here now that allow me to go through and pour over studies like this and then bring them back to the forefront and hopefully communicate them to a way or in a to you that is useful. And you can kind of look at your own life and see if this is something that you would want to use. in your practice for optimization or biohacking or whatnot. So that's what today's video is going to be about strap up. I think it's gonna be a really fun one.
in practice, but it's going to be cool to see this backed up in some data today. So as you can probably see, if you were watching the video, I am in my office, But I have a little bit of a new studio setup. I wanted to make it look more legit. Let me know your thoughts on that. If you're watching, the if it does look legit and I guess cool for a video format, appreciate you guys so much. I'm hopeful I can get my YouTube channel back at this time. It's still down, but I've hopeful, I'll talk with some people that I may get it back. So that would be really cool. If not, no worries.
I just make a new one until that one gets deleted again. But thank you guys so much. Uh, really have the best audience in the world. Without further ado, let me share my screen. And today we're going to look at human growth hormone in healthy adults. All right, I'm Hunter Williams and today's video is going to be human growth hormone use in adults. And we're going look at some studies on it today. So we are just going looking at anti-aging therapy through HGH. We are going going at it from an athletic performance enhancement perspective. I am also going go look some of the injury recovery applications and then also too for people that are deficient in growth hormones as adults,
we will look a some study around that too. Just as a refresher, what is HGH? A lot of people have this preconceived notion around HGH and it kind of has this like taboo effect, probably because of stuff related to sports and PED use. However, hopefully we're beyond that point now. And if you're not actively competing in a sport where HHH is banned and you are an aging adult, I think there is a perfectly good use case to use it. That's what we'll look at today. HGH, you'll probably hear it referred to chemically sometimes as somatropin, is a peptide hormone produced by our pituitary glands that stimulates growth,
cell reproduction, and regeneration. So natural HTH production peaks during childhood and adolescence, then gradually declines with age. Usually after the age of 30, it starts to decline pretty dramatically. And we now have synthetic recombinant human growth hormone that has been developed for medical use and is administered via injection. kind of one of those in the realm of anti-aging that's like the Holy Grail. Now let's look at it as an anti aging therapy. So we have this study from 1990. It was called the Rudman study. In 1990, Dr. Daniel Ruddman and colleagues conducted a six month trial with 12 healthy men over 60 receiving HGH injections compared to nine someone men without treatment.
The HGA treated men showed increased lean body mass and bone density as well as decreased fat relative to the controls. So authors noted these body composition changes were equivalent in magnitude to the changes incurred during 10 to 20 years of aging, which is pretty profound. Over how long was this? Six months. Think about that. In six months, we had the same effects as 10-20 years author or the authors on this paper kind of reversed age by 10 to 20 years.
So pretty cool. Although the study did not claim to reverse aging, the striking result led to intense public interest in HEH as a youth restoring therapy. We have 1990 studies. There was another one done in 1996, another done 1994. They reported small increases in lean mass, a few kilograms, which is not nothing. It's like probably six to eight pounds with HGH, but little changes in muscle strength or endurance. And I think as we go through this today, that's a common theme that you're going to see is that there is really not a strength benefit to growth hormone.
Now, me personally, it's not something I'm super worried about, We also have this 2002 Blackman study, so it was a 26 week randomized controlled trial with 131 women and men ages 65 to 88. So HGH alone significantly increased lean mass and decreased fat in both sexes. And to my knowledge, there's nothing I can find around this, they were not using testosterone therapy. In the men, the combination of HHH plus testosterone had additive effects and slightly improved cardiovascular endurance.
They did look at a portion of them that had testosterone with their growth hormone and there was a market improvement over just the HGH in isolation. We also have a 2002 systematic review. So this was an analysis of 31 high quality trials. About 500 total participants concluded that HH therapy increases lean body mass by around two kilograms and reduces fat mass around 2 kilograms on average without significant improvements in bone density, aerobic capacity, cholesterol, or longevity.
This specific one was a meta-analysis of trials and it looked at all these together, so about 500 total participants, and they did say that, okay, it does increase by about five pounds of muscle and reduce fat by five-pounds. However, they could not find market improvements in bone density, aerobic capacity, cholesterol, or longevity. So when we look at this as a whole, is it moving the needle in terms of longevity?
Maybe not directly on anything we can track. think that anyone would agree that increase in muscle mass and decrease in fat mass would be good for longevity itself. So let's now look at another anti-aging trial. This one also found that there was increased lean body mass around 2 kilograms, decreased fat mass of around two kilograms and improved body composition measurements. So again, no significant improvement in muscle strength, No improvement and aerobic capacity,no change in bone density,No improvement cholesterol and no
evidence of increased longevity. Again, we find that it helps. Let's look at some side effects. 30 to 40% of the patients in these trials had joint pain and swelling. So that is a noted common effect of human growth hormone is that you will have some swelling, some edema, particularly around your ankles, but potentially around the whole body. Now understand that this is dose dependent. A lot of times when we look at the dosing of growth hormones, that's what is causing these. Whereas if you're using one, two, I use a day that it's very rare, whether you are a man or a woman, the edema, the water retention,
and the swelling. So, participants on HGH reported joint pain, swelling, edma, or carpal tunnel. That's another thing sometimes that people get. 18 percent, there was what you would call a trend towards insulin resistance. Men on ACH develop glucose tolerance or diabetes versus 7 percent in non-HH men. Now, again, when we look at this, a lot of this is dose dependent. The difference in eight IUs versus two IU's there's probably going to be a little bit of a different response in the glucose metabolism there.
And also too, when we look at these people's lifestyle, what are they doing? So growth hormone by itself without exercise, without diet, with our strength training, and without testosterone, is it going be good for your glucose tolerance? I would think that the answer would be no. So Dr. Blackman's team concluded that HGH with or without Testosterone cannot be recommended as an anti-aging therapy outside of research settings. which is us, given the limited functional benefits and common adverse effects. And again, a lot of this is dose dependent. I couldn't find in this one the amount of IUs that they had, but I would probably like to go back and find that.
So we look at HGH and athletic performance. HH is banned in professional and Olympic sports, yet some athletes have used it illicitly, hoping to gain muscle mass, strength, or speed. Researchers have conducted numerous placebo control trials and healthy trained adults to see it actually improves athletic Most studies gave HGH daily for a few weeks, around 20 days at doses within ethical limits. So let's look at a 2008 study. When we look mass, this was a Stanford meta-analysis. HCH treated individuals gained about four to five pounds of lean body mass on average, but this likely reflected increased fluid retention,
not functional muscle. No gains in muscle strength were observed in the studies that measured this directly over six to 12 weeks of training with or without HTH. Again, we have the adverse effects. So HGH recipients had more soft tissue swelling, bloating, and fatigue than on those on placebo. And when we look at measures of cardiovascular fitness, like Bo2 mix, it showed no improvement with HTH. When we talk about athletic performance, you can't just wholesale say that HCH is going to make you a better athlete. Now, what it will do is take a good athlete and help them recover better.
It may help them recover from an injury better, it may them sleep better. So can we say in a short term, especially when compared to something like anabolic steroids, that growth hormone is going to necessarily help performance? Not really. However, the long term when we look at athletes who take a beating physically on their body, It's something that we can say like, okay, well, there probably is benefit and there's probably people using it that We don't know about so there was a wada so world anti-doping agency study in 2010 96 recreational athletes that were over age 28 Over an eight week eight-week period were observed.
So they were randomly assigned to paslebo or hgh at two milligrams a day Now when we look at 2 milligrams per day off the top of my head, that would be about six I use. So not a little dose of growth hormone, I would say enough to really see something, especially in a short window, but I personally use that long-term, no. So what did we find? The HEH injection improved anaerobic sprint capacity around four to 5% on average. Men given both HE and testosterone saw an added effect with about 8% improvement in sprint and so this would correlate to around a 0.4 second improvement
and a 10 second 100 meter dash. Now, if you know anything about 100m dash or if know about football with a 40 yard dash, .4 seconds or you extrapolated that down to a .40 yard which would really be .15 seconds improvement, you're potentially talking about millions and millions of dollars for someone that they would stand to gain from having that. So, again, can you say it improves athletic performance? No, but in this case we saw a 0.4 second improvement in intensive 10 second, 100 meter dash, which again, you're talking to like in terms of that,
that's pretty monumental. So HGH did not improve muscle strength, power, jump height, or endurance capacity. When we look at this, the summary of evidence around athletic performance, not really a strength benefit, and not an endurance benefit. Sprint capacity, yes, there is going to be a noted benefit there. And then we have the side effects, again if you are taking 6IUs, yeah, probably going have some side-effects from it. Especially if your not using it the smartest way and you aren't controlling for diet, and other variables there. So there's one thing I noted there, oh yeah, so multiple sports science reviews conclude that athletes taking HGH are likely doped,
but duped gaining a little beyond placebo effects and fluid retention, which you have to wonder, I don't know who's writing that. And maybe they're just trying to sway people a certain way in terms of the decisions that they have, especially if you're an athlete. Let's look at HTH for injury recovery and healing. So growth hormones role in cell growth and regeneration led researchers to test whether HGH can accelerate wound healing, fracture repair, or muscle recovery. Several human trials have explored these issues with mixed results. So let's look at this.
We have this burn healing study. It's a 2014 review. They looked at 13 RCTs with 701 patients that were adults and children. So on average, the burns covered at least 40% of body surface. So in this analysis, HGH significantly sped up burn wound healing in adults by about nine days on an average. Again, if I had a burn, that would be something that I would absolutely be employing. Healing of skin graft donor sites was around three days faster in HEH treated adults. Patients on HE h tended to have shorter hospital stays in some trials and HEh did not increase mortality or scar formation,
which is pretty cool. However, in this case, and this makes sense when you think of the fact that these burn patients are not exercising, HEhh greatly increased the risk of high blood sugar in burn patience. Those on HHH were about 2.4 times more likely to develop hyperglycemia than those on placebo. An elevated blood sugar is obviously a concern in critical care as it can raise infection risk and require insulin therapy. So again, my counter to that would be, well, if you were taking HGH to accelerate wound healing, why not use something? I don't think they had access to these, but a GLP-1.
or even metformin or dihydroberberine, which I'm sure they were not using. So let's look at HHH for bone fracture healing. This was a 2007 multicenter RCT, around 406 adults with tibial fractures, randomized through placebo or daily HCH injections at one of three doses. They had 15, 30, or 60 micrograms per kilogram. Let's see how much that would be with some public math real quick. If we had 60 that would basically be times 100. So if you're a 220 pound man, 60 micrograms would be 0.6 milligrams.
That would about two IUs. We have basically 0,5 IU's, one IU and two IU's. Pretty reasonable dose to do from like a therapeutic replacement perspective. for up to 16 weeks after surgery. So the results for all fractures combined, HEH did not significantly shorten healing time compared to placebo. Enclosed fractured with no open wound, the high dose HEG group healed faster than placebo, and again, when we look at that,
if it's 60 micrograms per kilogram for 100 kilogram man, that's still not that much. Imagine if you're a smaller woman, probably not going to help that much to the median time. So 95 days with high dose HCH versus 129 days, with placebo. There was a 26% reduction in recovery time and open fractures did not benefit from HTA treatment. The trial suggested that HGH can accelerate bone healing under certain conditions, closed fractured with adequate fixation, but routine use isn't standard given the marginal overall benefit and cost.
This one was interesting. So a 2020 study at the University of Michigan for ACL recovery. 19 young adult males between 18 to 35 years old with ACL tears. They self-injected HGH or placebo twice daily for six weeks, starting one week before the surgery. And HCH dose, we know from this, was in therapeutic ranges. Whatever that means, I couldn't find an amount. So at 12 weeks post-surgery, the HGH treated group had about a 29% greater knee extensor strength than the placebo group. Muscle size of the thigh did not differ between groups.
HHH helped the muscle function better even if atrophy still occurred and there was no significant adverse events noted with short-term use. So if you are dealing with ACL injury, shout out to Tyreek Hill filming this video. He actually just two nights ago I believe dislocated his knee and tore a bunch of stuff, but hopefully they can get Tyree kill some HGH if you're out there. Hopefully he has a speedy recovery. It was a really, really nasty injury. If you're squeamish, I would recommend not watching the video of it.
But Speedy Healing to Cheetah I think is his nickname. So sorry, had to throw some football in there. When we look at injury recovery, burn healing, HGH speeds burn, closure around nine days. and site healing by around three days. Bone fractures, definitely around, we saw around 26% improvement, ACL surgery, around 29% percent improvement. And critical illness, HEH, is contraindicated in acutely ill patients due to increased mortality in the 1999 study. It's hard to find some data around that, but just know that's out there.
Now let's look at the adult growth hormone deficiency. So what is growth hormonal deficiency? It typically results from pituitary gland disorders. Now, I wanted to speak to this for a second. I myself, to go back to football momentarily, played football for the better part of 17 years of my life. And what I noticed alongside with suppression of testosterone, basically what happens is your brain gets rattled around enough, pitutary doesn't function as well, thus your testosterone lowers. I noticed when I started HGH therapy, which was after I began testosterone therapy that there was an added benefit to me that I don't think I would be
able to get alone. Now you would say like, obviously, right? But at the age of like that time, like 26 or 27 years old, you think that your growth hormone would naturally pretty high and mine wasn't. Now, is that just me? Meaning like I just naturally don't have high growth hormone levels? I don' know. It's also hard to say. I started playing football when I was six or seven years old. So like my brain got around through all that development. What I'm saying is the same way that the the HPTA can be suppressed from a testosterone standpoint, from concussions, I think also in my experience,
my theory is, that it would be the maybe not as pronounced as it would with testosterone, but I still think there was suppression of my natural growth hormone from the hits that I took. Now, whether that's true or not, I don't know, But my life is better with growth hormones. So, um, when we see this adult growth, hormone deficiency. We see adults that have increased fat, especially this sort of fat decreased muscle mass, low energy and exercise capacity, poor mood, unfavorable lipid profiles, reduced bone density and higher cardiovascular risk.
So let's look at some of these adult growth hormone trials, 1989 and 1990. First placebo controlled trials by Dr. Urban Alamon and colleagues showed market improvements in body composition, increased lean muscle, decreased fat and improved exercise tolerance compared to placebo. Also in 1990, Salomon reported that six months of HGH and GH deficient men led to an eight to 10% increase in lean mass and a similar reduction in fat mass, normalization of plasma IGF-1 levels and improve well-being.
1990s, we also saw numerous subsequent RCTs confirming that GH replacement therapy in deficient adults improves muscle mass and strength, bone remodeling and bone density over the long-term capacity for exercise and quality of life. So these benefits established adult growth hormone efficiency as a real clinical condition that could be effectively treated leading to consensus guidelines by 1997 endorsing GH-replacement in diagnosed adults. We look at the 2000s to today. Long-term studies suggest that appropriate growth hormone replacement may reduce future cardiac risk and confer cardio protection since growth-hormone
deficiency is linked to premature atherosclerosis. Meta-analysis found significant improvements in VO2 max aerobic capacity with GH therapy in deficient adults translating to better exercise tolerance in day life. So maybe not so much of a benefit for people that are already fit or already have a good VO 2 max or aerobics capacity, However, for people that are deficient, there is a market improvement. So makes sense, right? But at the same time, you think about what having low growth hormone levels for a long period of time needs people to do. Now, with the cascade of environmental toxins that we have in our society today, it would lead one to believe that probably more people are walking around
with less growth hormone than would be optimal, especially depending on their age. So maybe a 38 year old guy, maybe his levels are okay. Maybe his IGF is somewhere around like 250, 280. Not bad, right? But we have a 58 year-old guy or a 63 year one. What is her IGP? What are her circulating growth level levels? Are they low enough that we may be at risk for cardiovascular disease? I would say probably. So that's just my theory. But I do think when we look at this, when you look growth hormone deficient adults, the result of replacing growth hormones to a therapeutic dose,
especially as you get up in age, is extremely beneficial to long-term health when see the data around those things. When we look at the GH deficient adults, what having GH does for them, body composition, obviously that's huge. 80 to 10% increase in muscle mass and 6 to 9% decrease in fat mass. Pretty good. Cardiovascular, better cardiovascular profile.
bone health increased bone density around five percent in the spine and lower fracture risk with long-term treatment and quality of life. Who doesn't want to feel better, look better and be healthier long term? So again when we look at adults with growth hormone deficiency treatment around 20 to 30 percent have side effects. Side effects again fluid retention joint pain Could potentially be high blood sugar now I would count on those things that that's dose dependent and if you're doing everything to live insulin controlled Especially now with GLP ones. It is a non-issue, but that is my opinion so When we look at different populations, obviously we can see that the growth hormone deficient adults stand
to benefit much more when it comes to lean mass, and lean-mass accrual, muscle accrue,l and fat loss. Whereas people that have normal growth levels benefit, but not as much. So that's what that chart looks at right here. If you're watching the video, you can the dark blue is the GH deficients adults in terms of the lean, mass percentage gain that they had. And then we see the healthy adults and then the young athletes. And then obviously we have strength improvement, GH, deficient adults, huge gains in strength, improvement.
Normal GH not so much. So to answer the question of like, well, how do I know if I'm deficent? Yeah, you can use IGF-1 levels of proxies, but sometimes that's still not enough. caveat being that yes, you can look at IGF-1 levels and growth hormone levels, but a lot of times, people may not realize a deficiency until they supplement with growth hormones and see marked results, where, as you see in this case, two to three IUs is probably not going to do a lots for people that are already in that range.
Now, if you take someone that's in a good range and you give them eight Ius, is there going be improvement? Yeah, I think so. Probably gonna be side effects too. However, If you two I use a growth hormon and it's the best thing ever, probably were deficient. And that's how it was for me. Like for Me Too, I use a growth hormone. The amount of fat loss that I got, the better sleep that i got was marketed. So that is where I was saying like, okay, i probably have reason to believe that my growth-hormone production was impaired because of the impairment of my pituitary axis from having a lot of concussions. Long way of saying, the lower you are in growth hormone naturally, it sounds simple, but the more you're going to benefit from exogenous use.
So we look at anti-aging, HGH slightly increases muscle and decreases fat in older adults, does not restore youth or improve functional health. Side effects are common. There's an anti aging benefit when we say it's like solely the best thing. Lots of better things out there if that's what we're looking for. We look at athletic performance, not showing an enhanced strength, endurance, or overall fitness. We do have a result in sprint testing. I think from athletic, performance there's other things obviously you can use that are going to have bigger needle moving effect in terms of athletic.
Performance, I. Think for athletes, probably better recovery from injury and better sleep. Obviously from. Injury recovery, we showed that that does have. A use case market improvement in injury recovery. Whether it's a burn and ACL tear or even a fracture. And then we look at GH-deficient adults, which again, who's to say who is deficient and who isn't? One of those things is up for interpretation. But there is established medical basis for giving growth hormone to growth-hormone deficients adults and seeing marked improvements across all those parameters,
including muscle, fat loss, and cardiovascular risk markers. Let's look at it risk benefit. So the high benefit is going to be for GH deficient and elderly. The low benefit, is gonna be, for athletes and healthy adults. However, I think there is a use case for therapeutic replacement in one to two IUs. When we look, at the conclusion, basically we want to replace. Now is using 8IUs of growth hormone long-term the smartest thing to do? I would say no. there's a use case for everything. And I think we're bodybuilding, you're trying to put on size, that you could use that.
Now we talk at like one to two, I use, is there a used case of that? I Think age dependent and life dependent depending on the person. Yes, absolutely. So future research may better clarify and expand HHS therapeutic niche, for instance, and rehabbing injuries. But for now, i think the mantra should be replacement, not enhancement, meaning that we want to replace the healthiest levels that I don't want to make this a discussion about IGF levels and everything, but it's hard to just base whether or not we need growth hormone on that.
I think the best case is to use it, see what happens, and then go from there. Maybe you need it. And that is a look at some of the studies that we have on human growth hormone. So pretty cool. You know, I think there's probably more studies out there on growth hormones than BPC-157. Although the use cases of Bpc- 157, far exceed the US cases for growth. But I do think, in terms of my final verdict, that growth hormone is something that every aging individuals can stand to replace.
And that's going to look different for everyone. If you're 38, you might not need to be replace it, but I was 26 and I stood a lot of benefit from replacing growth hormones. in my life because my levels were pretty low. And then I think if I'm going off of memory, but my IGF levels at that time were like 150, 180. So for, you know, a 25 year old man, that's really not that high and having my level's closer to like 250 to 300, I feel a lot better. Again, that's not always the best proxy, but I think it's just a case-by-case situation.
I do think, though, if we look at an anti-aging and longevity stack, the growth hormone, you can reasonably make the argument that it should exist in everyone's, especially like after the age of 50 or 55. The younger someone is, probably the less you could make that argument, Once someone is over 50, I think growth hormone really should be a staple in their protocol. So hopefully that was helpful to you guys. I would love to hear your feedback on this one. Obviously have a new office setup. Let me know if it's better or worse.
Welcome reminder and prescient. I think just just it's so good to hear feedback from you guys to let me know that this matters to you and what I do matter. So I appreciate you got so much bottom of my heart. Thank you. Have the best audience in the world. And that's it for this one.
