Did you know that some types of injuries can take as long as a whole month to heal? When it comes to injury recovery, no one wants to be sitting around waiting for a wound to heal. For that reason, people are starting to use HGH for injury recovery.
HGH, or human growth hormone, is a hormone that humans naturally produce in their bodies, especially during childhood. But what does it have to do with tissue repair and wound healing? More than that, is there a chance that this hormone could speed along the injury repair process?
What does this hormone do exactly and what happens if you inject it into your body? Keep reading and learn more about HGH for injury recovery below.
What You Need To Know About Human Growth Hormone (HGH)
Before you learn about how human growth hormone interacts with wounds in the body, you should first understand what HGH is and how it works. The first thing you should know about this hormone is that its main purpose is to promote children to grow taller. That way, at some point during their adolescence, they will reach their adult height and stop growing after that.
During childhood, the body is filled with human growth hormone. After all, a child not only needs to grow taller but also larger. A child’s bones and other tissues also need to become stronger and denser.
HGH can help accomplish all of this. If there is not enough HGH in a child’s body, it is usually noticeable because the child will be unusually small, thin, and fragile. As a child grows older, the amount of HGH in the body will start to decrease.
Once a person reaches adulthood, the person’s HGH levels will be very low but the hormone will not disappear entirely. While a person will not continue growing in height during adulthood, a person still needs HGH to maintain the health of various organs inside of the body. It is especially helpful for keeping muscles and bones strong and healthy.
It is only during middle age that the levels of HGH in the body really start to drop. It is during this time that older people start to develop weaker bones, lesser muscle mass, and so on, which makes the overall body weaker. The human growth hormone is produced by the pituitary gland which is a small gland that rests in the middle of the brain.
There are a few disorders associated with the production of HGH.
Problems With the Pituitary Gland
For example, a small number of people experience giantism which, as the name suggests, involves the person growing to an abnormal size. This happens when there is something wrong with the pituitary gland (such as if it is affected by a tumor) and the gland continues to produce large amounts of HGH when it’s not supposed to.
This would cause a full-grown adult to keep growing in an abnormal way. There is also the case in which the pituitary gland does not produce enough HGH which results in the affected person being unusually short and small. Whatever the case, it is obvious that the human growth hormone is very important for the overall health and well-being of the human body.
More and more people are starting to become more familiar with the importance of this hormone. For that reason, you may often see HGH used in an attempt to treat certain problems. For example, many people are starting to use HGH as a sort of anti-aging treatment.
Some (especially older adults) believe that if they take HGH as they get older that they may be able to stave off some of the effects of aging such as weakening bones and muscles. Of course, there is very little research behind the use of HGH for anti-aging. For that reason, more research is necessary to know how true these beliefs and claims are.
However, the human growth hormone for joint repair and wound healing is another story. HGH healing is also a relatively new field of study and there are still many scientific studies that are ongoing concerning the use of HGH for arthritis, wound healing, and more. But how does it work and how effective is it really?
Does HGH Work for Wound and Injury Recovery?
There are many kinds of wounds and injuries that could affect the human body. For that reason, it is not so simple to determine whether or not HGH works for wound recovery in general. This is because the different tissues in the body have very different healing mechanisms and timelines.
For example, minor skin wounds may heal in a week while wounds that affect cartilage (such as ear piercings), may never completely heal. So, it is impossible to say that HGH works the same when attempting to heal different wounds across the body. But, in general, how well does this hormone work?
The first thing you should know is that human growth hormone has the ability to affect the division of cells in the body. Normally, cells divide and reproduce at a certain rate. It is the division of cells that allows wounds to heal.
For example, if you get a big gash in your skin, the surrounding skin cells will divide and reproduce until they cover the gash and heal it. This is the same with most other parts of the body. Your body is always producing new cells, even if you aren’t injured in any way.
Since HGH affects the way cells divide and reproduce, this hormone may have some beneficial results when being used to help the healing process. A few studies using lab rats were done to test the ability of this hormone to affect cell division. In one study, a few mice that had sustained an injury to the liver were used and then injected with HGH.
These animals in the study were also quite old, so the healing process for them was quite slow compared to lab rats of a younger age.
The Details
When HGH was injected into these animals, it was found that the hormone seems to stimulate a gene known as the Foxm1b. In general, the Foxm1 is very important for both the recovery of injured tissues as well as the division of cells.
So, once these old rats were injected with some human growth hormone, the study found that the rats’ injured livers started to heal. Not only that, however, but the livers started to heal at unusually fast rates for older rats and the rate of healing was more similar to the healing process of younger rats.
Of course, this is only one study out of many and there are many more studies that need to be done on this subject before we realize how useful HGH really is for wound recovery.
However, this is a good start. It shows that HGH does indeed have some kind of power for healing wounds and injuries, even those as complex as liver injuries. Not only can this hormone help heal an injury but it can also help speed along the healing process.
It also seems to ignore the age of the subject. Even if the subject is old, like the old rats, this hormone seems to be able to heal the injured subject in a very speedy way. Due to the fact that the results using lab rats were quite successful, using HGH in human settings has started to become more popular.
While HGH isn’t used as a common treatment for injury repair just yet, there have been some experiments related to the use of this hormone in relation to people recovering after invasive surgery.
Does HGH Work for Post-Surgical Recovery?
While surgeries are meant to help a health issue, surgeries always result in injury to the body’s tissues to some extent. Recovering after surgery is often difficult and time-consuming because the patient is often not able to move around freely at first. It is also possible to pick up an infection, especially with more extensive surgeries.
There was once a study done on around 200 people who had just had surgery. Half of the people in this study were treated with human growth hormone while the other half were not. By the end of the study, it was found that those who had been treated with the hormone had far lower rates of infection compared to those who had not been treated.
This is because this hormone naturally has anti-bacterial properties. Besides that, those who had been treated with human growth hormone seemed to not be as tired after their surgeries. As such, they were able to be a bit more active which is another important factor when considering wound healing.
This hormone also seemed to have an effect on the muscle mass of the patients after surgery. After surgery, in general, people tend to lose muscle mass. This is because they must be confined to their beds for long periods of time before they start to heal and become more mobile.
However, in the study, it was found that those who were treated with HGH seemed to maintain more of their muscle mass compared to those who did not receive any HGH. As you can imagine, this could be very helpful for helping people to recover after surgeries and injuries in general. But again, this was only one study of a couple of hundred people.
To really see how effective this hormone is, it is necessary for many more studies to occur with similar results. Once more studies are done and HGH continues to produce similarly impressive results, then HGH may become a more common treatment for tissue repair. But how does HGH work on other parts of the body other than muscle, organs, and skin?
Can HGH Heal Tendons and Ligaments?
As people get older, they often start to have problems with their tendons and ligaments. Some people may develop inflamed tendons that make it difficult to walk or move. Some people may tear their tendons during some kind of activity such as tennis and the injury may take a long time to heal.
Whatever the case, HGH does seem to have a beneficial effect on tendon and ligament injuries. Tendon and ligament injuries, in general, take a long time to heal on their own because they consist of tough, fibrous tissue. In some cases, they may never heal completely and may be weakened after injury.
But the administration of HGH seems to speed along this healing process. Only a few studies have been done on the effectiveness of HGH on tendon and ligament healing, and some of the studies were on rats rather than humans. Even so, the studies showed that the administration of HGH to subjects with injured ligaments seemed to experience faster healing.
This may be because how HGH allows the body to produce more collagen. Collagen is very important for holding together various tissues in the body on a cellular level. By increasing the rate of collagen production, injured tendons and ligaments will have the means to repair themselves in a more efficient way.
What You Need to Know About HGH for Injury Recovery
HGH for injury recovery is still in its early stages. We still don’t know the full extent of what HGH treatment can do for the body. However, with the studies conducted so far, it does seem that HGH does have some promising abilities for the healing of injured tissues in the body.
It may also be useful for speeding along the process of injury recovery. To learn more about HGH treatments or if you want to try them yourself, click here.