The 2008 Growth Hormone Summit was held by the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA in conjunction with Major League Baseball (MLB) and the law firm of Foley and Lardner at the Beverly Hills Hotel in California on November 10, 2008. Dr. Gary Green, professor of family medicine at the UCLA medical school, chaired the conference of leading anti-doping experts and scholars. “Growth Hormone: Barriers to Implementation of hGH in Sports” addressed several scientific, legal and ethical issues involving testing athletes for human growth hormone (”Landmark conference to look at use of human growth hormone by athletes,” October 22).
- understanding the currently available methods for identifying use of hGH and understanding the viability of urine testing for hGH in the future;
- building a consensus on the most effective methods of implementing widespread blood testing for abuse of hGH;
- identifying future strategies for hGH testing; and
- understanding the United States Laws regarding the regulation and distribution of hGH
The current state of HGH testing involves blood testing. Anti-doping expert Don Catlin supervised growth hormone testing at the 2008 Beijing Olympics which involved approximately 1,000 blood samples; no athlete tested positive for HGH. In fact, no athlete has ever tested positive for human growth hormone using this test which has led many experts to question the effectiveness of the test (”Officials Question a Blood Test That Is Never Positive,” November 10)
Three hours into a conference held Monday by Major League Baseball on human growth hormone, the real question of the day emerged when officials from the commissioner’s office and the players union wondered aloud about how effective the current blood test for human growth hormone was if no one had tested positive.
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Osquel Barroso, the senior manager of science for the World Anti-Doping Agency, was one such expert invited to the conference. WADA, which oversees the testing of Olympic athletes, has tested 8,500 athletes for human growth hormone since 2000 and has never had a test come back positive.
The big news at the Growth Hormone Summit was the increasingly viable urine test for human growth hormone that utilizes nanotechnology to identify urinary HGH markers. Don Catlin, CEO of Anti-Doping Research and Professor Emeritus at the UCLA School of Medicine is collaborating with Lance Liotta, MD, PhD of George Mason University to validate the utility of this test for WADA Read the rest of this entry »
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