Bicycle racing champion, Lance Armstrong denied allegations of doping and HGH use until 2013. The multi-winner of Tour de France had fallen under a cloud that many, in his sport, say are wide-spread. Knowledge within athletics may be wide-spread. Outside of sports, not as much knowledge of HGH is limited and often confused. Here you can learn more about HGH in sports and how GH finds its way into the sports world. Now let’s get to the topic. What is HGH used for in sport and how it affects on results improvement.
How to test HGH doping?
The body makes different forms of GH, each of which has a unique molecular weight (measured in daltons). Most natural (or “endogenous”) growth hormone comes in either a 22,000- or a 20,000-dalton form. Synthetic growth hormone, on the other hand, tends to come in a standard size: 22,000 daltons. By checking the ratio of the 22-kDa and 20-kDa varieties, it’s a possible spot the presence of the lab-made chemical. Olympic athletes at Athens and Turin were tested for unnatural growth hormone using just this test.
The ratio test has two big problems. First, you have to catch the doper pretty soon after he takes the drug—the ratio of the two isoforms returns to normal within a few days. Anti-doping experts are hard at work to find a more persistent marker for synthetic-hormone use. One approach would be to look for another protein whose levels are affected by an increase in growth hormone. These might be other compounds related to growth, like the insulin-like growth factors, or IGFs.
The second problem with the ratio test is the needle. Players are more willing to pee in a cup than to pop a vein, but you won’t find much growth hormone in a sample of urine. Urinalysis works for steroids because they’re much smaller molecules—on the order of hundreds of daltons, as opposed to tens of thousands. The kidneys pass anabolic steroids into the urine, but they leave out almost all of the larger growth hormone.
Using of HGH in Sports
Growth hormone in sports deals with the use of growth hormones for the improvement of athletic ability. HGH, or human growth hormone, is a prescription medication and the use of HGH without a prescription is illegal.
HGH occurs naturally in the body. The use of HGH through injection, initially, was for medical purposes and then athletes got hold of it. Before HGH was developed in the early 80s, the only place to get, HGH was from the deceased.
The arrival of HGH, along with other hormone advancements, has made HGH more available both on the black market and from legitimate sources.
According to Dan Duchaine’s “Underground Steroid Handbook”, 1982 was the first to describe the use of HGH as a doping agent. The 1989 Olympic Committee became the first sanctioning body to brand HGH a banned substance. Despite HGH being illegal in the US, observers state that HGH is present in all levels of sport — from high school sports through the pros.
The proliferation of HGH rests partly on the fact that HGH is harder to detect than other performance-enhancing drugs such as steroids.
While there has never been a large randomized controlled trial that proves HGH provides benefits to users, there are also no significant adverse drug reactions. Many small studies have indicated the analysis was limited by the fact that little of the research evaluated athletic performance and by the fact that dosing levels in the studies did not reflect real-world use.