HGH, Experimental and clinical studies of recombinant human growth hormone treatment.

Guo X, Chen Y, Jin R.

Beijing You an Hospital, Beijing 100054,China.

BACKGROUND: To assess the effect of recombinant human growth hormone (rhGH) therapy to liver cirrhosis patients with hypoproteinemia. METHODS: 31 liver cirrhosis patients were treated with rh GH (0.25 IU/kg/day-) and 20 such patients with human albumin (10 g/day) as control all for 10 days. Serum levels of growth hormone (GH), insulin-like growth factor (IGF)-1 and albumin (ALB) were measured by radio-immunoassay before 24h and after 24h and 10 days of rhGH therapy.Serum levels of GH and IGF-1 of 10 age matched healthy subjects were also measured. RESULTS: As compared with healthy subjects, the pretreatment serum GH level of liver cirrhosis patients was high (4.96 +/- 3.97 vs 1.62 +/- 2.26, P <0.05), and the IGF-1 level was markedly lower (36.53 +/- 12.77 vs 56.95 +/- 16.46, P <0.01). After 10 days of rhGH administration, the serum IGF-1 and ALB levels of the treated group increased significantly as compared with the control group (P <0.01). CONCLUSIONS: Exogenous rhGH therapy can overcome the GH resistance of liver cirrhosis patient s and can increase significantly the serum albumin level as compared with the control group who were treated with human albumin only.