Last Updated on by
The chances are you know a great deal about human growth hormone and how it works, and perhaps what its benefits are. Perhaps you are even interested in using it for weight loss or else as a boost for your athletic endeavors. But do you know how human growth hormone came to be so easily available? In other words, what exactly is the history of human growth hormone?
HGH was needed to treat people with a deficiency:
Actually the source of how human growth hormone was developed began when researchers first diagnosed human growth hormone deficiency as a condition not too long after the end of world war 1 . With the condition diagnosed, obviously, people wanted to know methods of treating it. Medical researches tried to use growth hormone from different animals. However, this didn’t work very well, because no matter how much hormone from these sources was purified, it never seemed to work effectively with humans. Many researchers postulate that there is a considerable difference between the molecular pattern of non human growth hormone and human growth hormone, and it is postulated that this is perhaps the reason most such treatments or rather attempts to treat patients with growth hormone from other animal species did not work.
HGH sourced from Cadavers:
When animal sources failed researchers, many were at their wits end. However an American researcher called Maurice Raben an endocrinologist from Tuft university in Boston began to extract human growth hormone from the pituitary gland of cadavers. As it turned out, this was quite successful, and when Maurice Raben extracted sufficient quantities of human growth hormone from various cadavers, he then worked further to purify the human growth hormone before administering it to patients. Most of his first cases were very successful, and this led to a regular sourcing among the medical community of human growth hormone from cadavers.
All this happened around the 1960s,when this form of treatment for human growth deficiency was very popular. However, there was a problem in treatment in that the supplies of human growth hormone were very limited. Nevertheless, researchers around the country began to source pituitary glands from morgues, and then to extract and purify the human growth hormone sited in these glands. Since there was a very limited supply of human growth hormone, it would only be prescribed or the most extreme cases.
Severe shortages and ‘rationing’ of HGH:
Generally speaking, human growth hormone in this form, sourced from cadavers, was reserved for the use of children whose growth was stunted due to a human growth hormone deficiency. Such deficient children would have first call upon supplies of human growth hormone. Also, even this was selective, in that children with the mild deficiency were left untreated, and only those whose deficiency was severe enough to call for treatment, were treated with these extremely limited stocks of human growth hormone. In fact according to wikipedia: “from 1963 to 1985 about 7700 children in the U.S. and 27,000 children worldwide were given GH extracted from human pituitary glands to treat severe GH deficiency“.
Also, there was only a limited period in the treatment , that is to say, once a child grew sufficiently to function as an adult, treatment was stopped whether or not their deficiency continued to stunt them. Many of these children who were partially treated never reached their full height.
These steps may seem cruel, but at that time they were necessary, because there were only limited supplies of human growth hormone sourced from cadavers, and these had to be used to do the most good that was possible under the conditions.
However, in the year 1985 a serious drawback to using human growth hormone from cadavers became apparent. It seems that many people who received the human growth hormone from cadavers in their youth later developed Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease due to the human growth hormone actually being contaminated with disease causing prions. This was a serious setback to the medical community, as it was now obviously not safe to use human growth hormone sourced from cadavers. As a matter of fact, doctors around the world stopped prescribing this no matter how extreme the case. It was hardly worthwhile to treat human growth hormone deficiency with material from cadavers, if the patient would then in ten or fifteen years time contract a disease as a result of receiving the treatment. Today human growth hormone from cadavers is not used at all.
The development of the synthetic version:
Progress had to wait until the year 1991, when a synthetic version of human growth hormone was developed by Genentech now a member of the Roche pharmaceutical group. This was the beginning of many advances in human growth hormone treatments; today human growth deficiency is easily treated, and all thanks to the fact that now we can synthesize human growth hormone and treat with it safely.
Today a shortage of human growth hormone is a thing of the past, so much so that not only people who suffer from human growth hormone deficiency, but also those who suffer from obesity are interested in using HGH. Other people who use, or misuse, human growth hormone are athletes and bodybuilders who try to boost their performance by using this performance enhancing substance.
Ultimately, this is only a drop in the ocean of the information available on human growth hormone. Feel free however to leave us a comment on this subject, and if you found this info helpful please share us with your friends.