Dehydroepiandrosterone improves psychological well-being in male and female hypopituitary patients on maintenance growth hormone replacement.

What Was Tested

This randomized controlled trial looks at Exogenous HGH, sermorelin & older GHRPs (why they're passed over).

Their objective was to determine the effect of DHEA administration on mood in hypopituitary adults on established GH replacement with a constant serum IGF-I.

Why It Was Studied

Patients with panhypopituitarism have impaired quality of life (QoL) despite GH replacement.

Who Took Part

The abstract describes 21 patients taking part.

PubMed tags the participants as both men and women.

Thirty female and 21 male hypopituitary patients enrolled.

Data from 26 females and 18 males were analyzed after patient withdrawal.

How the Study Was Run

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

Random assignment meant chance, not the researchers, decided who got Exogenous HGH, sermorelin & older GHRPs (why they're passed over) and who got the comparison, which limits bias.

Blinding on both sides kept the patients and researchers unaware of who received Exogenous HGH, sermorelin & older GHRPs (why they're passed over).

A placebo (an inactive look-alike) gave the Exogenous HGH, sermorelin & older GHRPs (why they're passed over) group a baseline to be compared against.

A double-blind, placebo-controlled trial was conducted over an initial 6 months followed by an open phase of 6 months of DHEA.

The study was conducted at a tertiary referral endocrinology unit.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Dehydroepiandrosterone, Growth Hormone, Health Status Indicators, Hormone Replacement Therapy, Hypopituitarism, Insulin-Like Growth Factor I and Quality of Life.

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) in 21 patients.

With fewer than 40 people, it is a small study, so it is better read as an early signal for further research than as a settled answer.

Results are reported in around 5 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2006 (The Journal of clinical endocrinology and metabolism), a journal based in United States.

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