SciAm piece asking whether GH peptides actually do anything for ageing
Posted by fasted_scientist in GH & Growth Peptides - 1 points, 2 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.
Community discussion - research and educational context only. Not medical advice.