Growth hormone administration and exercise effects on muscle fiber type and diameter in moderately frail older people.

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of Exogenous HGH, sermorelin & older GHRPs (why they're passed over), published as a randomized controlled trial.

The researchers evaluated measures of muscle strength, muscle fiber type, and cross sectional area in response to treatment with recombinant human growth hormone (rhGH) with or without a structured resistance exercise program in frail older subjects.

Who Took Part

PubMed indexes the participants as older adults, both men and women.

Outpatient clinical research center at an urban university-affiliated teaching hospital.

Thirty-one consenting older subjects (mean age 71.3 +/- 4.5 years) recruited as a subset of a larger project evaluating rhGH and exercise in older people, who underwent 62 quadricep-muscle biopsies.

How the Study Was Run

The researchers set it up as a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study.

The participants were allocated by chance, so the Exogenous HGH, sermorelin & older GHRPs (why they're passed over) group and the comparison group should start out alike.

Neither the participants nor the staff measuring them knew who was on Exogenous HGH, sermorelin & older GHRPs (why they're passed over), so expectations could not easily colour the readings.

Some participants received a placebo instead of Exogenous HGH, sermorelin & older GHRPs (why they're passed over), giving a reference point.

Placebo-controlled, randomized, double blind trial.

Muscle biopsy specimens were obtained from the vastus lateralis muscle.

Isokinetic dynamometry strength tests were used to monitor individual progress and to adjust the weights used in the exercise program.

Serum insulin-like growth factor-I (IGF-I) was measured and body composition was measured using a Hologic QDR 1000W dual X-ray densitometer.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Age Factors, Analysis of Variance, Biopsy, Body Composition, Combined Modality Therapy, Exercise Therapy and Frail Elderly.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Exogenous HGH, sermorelin & older GHRPs (why they're passed over).

Results are reported in around 7 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2001 (Journal of the American Geriatrics Society), a journal based in United States.

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