Wall Street Journal: HGH No Rocket Fuel

According to a Wall Street Journal article, scientific evidence goes against the idea that an HGHed up Roger Clemens would result in an increase in fastball velocity, strength and rage associated with its PED cousin, the anabolic steroid. It will, however, let your body recover like a radioactive Peter Petrelli, but it would seem that is not a point of interest.

What if Roger Clemens did take human growth hormone? It’s not clear his fastballs got any hotter because of it — at least not according to the scientific literature.

Stanford medical school researchers, their curiosity piqued by the brouhaha around athletes using HGH, recently tried to determine if the folks alleged to have used HGH were practicing evidence-based medicine. Do the data demonstrate any benefit for athletes? Little, if any, according to the results published in the current issue of Annals of Internal Medicine.

The Stanford researchers found 27 past randomized, controlled studies, with a total of 303 participants, that tested the physiological effects of injections of growth hormone compared with a placebo in healthy people. The studies were also double-blinded, meaning the patients and researchers didn’t know whether they got the HGH or not.

Participants in the studies did seem to show an increase in their lean body mass, which is generally associated with more muscle. But in the two studies that looked at muscle strength, HGH users didn’t show an improvement. One possibility is that HGH is causing fluid retention, Hau Liu, the study’s lead author, tells the Health Blog. It’s hard to differentiate between muscle and fluids, he explains.

Hankie Says Baseball Was Singled Out. Yankees boss-in-training, Hank Steinbrenner, does not like the fact that Major League Baseball is picking up the PED tab for the rest of professional sports. The NFL once saw offensive lineman over 300 lbs as freaks, but now such specimens are considered the norm. As is probably the case with MLB, somewhere in every NFL lockerroom is a Steve Lattimer locked in a bathroom stall transforming himself from David Banner to the Incredible Hulk. Steinbrenner opined that "everybody that knows sports knows football is tailor-made for performance-enhancing-drugs." The Yankees owner also said he was irritated when wondering "how [the NFL] managed to skate by" and believed "the number in football is at least twice as many [as baseball]."