SciAm piece asking whether GH peptides actually do anything for ageing
Posted by fasted_scientist in GH & Growth Peptides - 10 points, 5 comments.
There's a Scientific American piece out, "Growth hormone peptides promise to stall aging, but does the science stack up?" going through sermorelin, tesamorelin and the rest of the GHRH/GHrp family. It's a decent mainstream overview, and they don't dodge the obvious question, which is whether bumping IGF-1 in a healthy adult does anything useful at all.
My take is they are quite generous to the field. The cytoprotective and wound healing data in animals is interesting, but translating a rat wound model to "my sleep is deeper and my recovery is faster" is a massive leap. Most of the human data on tesamorelin is in specific populations (HIV lipodystrophy, GH deficient adults), not your average 30 something biohacker chasing a bit more recovery. Ngl I think a lot of the longevity claims are still mostly story.
For those of you on ipam or tes, did anything in this piece change how you think about your stack, or were you already sceptical of the anti-ageing angle?
Comments
- weekendnate: Agreed, they were generous. The animal wound healing stuff is cool but rat skin repairs faster than ours by default, so the bar is different than people assume. For me, what stood out is how thin the "healthy adult" data actually is. Almost everything interesting is in GH deficient or HIV lipodystrophy populations, which already tells you something. If your IGF-1 is mid range and your sleep and training are dialed in, I'm not convinced bumping it another 30% does what people want it to. The on
- fasted_scientist: Ha fair, the rat skin point is a good one, ngl I hadn't thought about it that way. On recovery though, I genuinely don't know. I've had periods where I felt I was bouncing back quicker on ipam and periods where I felt nothing, and I can't honestly tell you which was the real signal and which was me wanting it to work. That's partly why I started doubting the whole thing, if I can't tell in my own training log then the effect is probably too small to lean on.
- runner_aaron: Yeah fair, and tbh that recovery bit is what keeps me from writing the whole class off. The sleep and skin stuff I can take or leave, but the days my training load is stupid and I'm still bouncing back fine, I find it hard to call that placebo. The GH deficient point is the one that gets me though. If the signal only really shows up when you're actually low, then chasing it when you're mid range is basically paying to feel normal right? Or am I missing something.
- fasted_scientist: That's the exact bit that nags me too. If the population data is mostly GH deficient adults getting IGF-1 into range, then a healthy 30 something pushing it higher is a different question entirely. Could be paying for a more expensive version of fine, which isn't nothing if sleep is genuinely better, but it's a stretch to call it longevity.
- erin_rows: Aye, the "expensive version of fine" line is basically what I keep coming back to. To be fair my sleep scores did nudge up when I tried sermorelin, but nudge isn't the same as proof, and I'd want a proper trial before calling it anything fancy.
Community discussion - research and educational context only. Not medical advice.