Effect of 6 months of GH treatment on myosin heavy chain composition in GH-deficient patients.

What Was Tested

Researchers studied Human Growth Hormone in this randomized controlled trial publication.

To investigate the effect of GH on myosin heavy chain (MHC) isoform composition, physical fitness and body composition in GH-deficient (GHD) patients.

Who Took Part

PubMed indexes the participants as adults and middle-aged adults, both men and women.

How the Study Was Run

In design terms this was a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study.

Because people in this Human Growth Hormone study were split into groups at random, differences between the groups are less likely to reflect who happened to join each one.

Neither the participants nor the staff measuring them knew who was on Human Growth Hormone, so expectations could not easily colour the readings.

A placebo (an inactive look-alike) gave the Human Growth Hormone group a baseline to be compared against.

Twelve age-matched controls were also included in the study.

MHC isoform composition in biopsies obtained from the vastus lateralis muscle was determined using SDS-PAGE.

Physical fitness was determined on a bicycle ergometer and body composition was determined using bioelectrical impedance analysis.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Body Composition, Deficiency Diseases, Human Growth Hormone, Linear Models, Major Histocompatibility Complex, Myosin Heavy Chains and Physical Fitness.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Human Growth Hormone.

Its findings take up roughly 9 sentences of the abstract and are left out here on purpose; the source paper is the place to read them.

The publication is from 1999 (European journal of endocrinology), a journal based in England.

More context: the related Exogenous HGH, sermorelin & older GHRPs (why they're passed over) library page, all human trials.