tedrick@ernie.BERKELEY.EDU (Tom Tedrick) (10/27/85)
I had a source of exotic nutritional substances some years ago. I wasn't fully aware of what I was taking but it was partly a borderline scientific (meaning completely unorthodox and secret) experiment in which I was an unknowing subject. Some strange things happened. Even though I was about 30 years old at the time, I seem to have gained half an inch or so in height. I put on 30 pounds of weight (which was muscle at the time as I was into weight training, but has since been replaced by fat). I'm wondering if I was given growth hormones. I've read that one danger of these hormones is some rare brain disease that doesn't manifest for many years (hope to God I don't have it, although some people might say my brain has already gone bad :-) ...) Everything I took was taken orally, no injections. Does anyone know anything about these growth hormones? (I think they are extracted from pituitary glands.) Thanks, -Tom
sdyer@bbncc5.UUCP (Steve Dyer) (10/28/85)
> I'm wondering if I was given growth hormones. I've read > that one danger of these hormones is some rare brain > disease that doesn't manifest for many years (hope > to God I don't have it, although some people might > say my brain has already gone bad :-) ...) > > Everything I took was taken orally, no injections. You are referring to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a form of dementia similar to kuru in New Guinea and scrapie in sheep, and now thought to be caused by a kind of "slow virus", an infectious agent quite smaller than most viruses, and still far from well-characterized. Tragic proof of its transmissibility came from a patient who developed the disease after receiving a corneal transplant taken from a person who died from the disease. I recently read that there are a few cases being reported in people who received human growth hormone several years ago. HGH has to be harvested from the pituitaries of cadavers, and it is likely that C-J disease wasn't considered when screening donor pituitaries until the "slow virus" theory became popular in the 1970's. Hopefully soon we will have HGH produced by recombinant DNA methods, precluding such outcomes in the future. To restate my point, HGH doesn't CAUSE Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease: the present method of obtaining HGH increases the risk of developing the disease because of the possibility of pituitary extracts harboring the infectious agent. Now, with that said, it think it's highly unlikely that you were given growth hormone. First, it is tremendously expensive, as you might guess from its present method of production. No backwoods "nutritionist" could afford to buy the stuff, nor could you afford to pay for it outside of traditional medical insurance channels. Second, like most proteins, HGH needs to be injected to be effective. If ingested, it's digested. You don't waste a treatment costing thousands of dollars by letting a patient digest it as if it were a hamburger! -- /Steve Dyer {harvard,seismo}!bbnccv!bbncc5!sdyer sdyer@bbncc5.ARPA