Is Growth Hormone Next 'Magic Bullet' For Athletes?

DALLAS - Lyle Alzado's wife was frantic. Her husband, the former All-Pro defensive end, had been using all sorts of weird drugs, and she wanted his doctor to know about it.

One day while Alzado was out, she scoured their apartment, dumped the drugs into a bag and took them to Dr. Rob Huizenga, the former Los Angeles Raiders' team doctor and one of Alzado's personal physicians.

Huizenga found all sorts of steroids and painkillers. He found thyroid medicines, amphetamines, even veterinary drugs.

He also found vials of human growth hormone, thousands of dollars' worth of the new and little-understood synthetic drug that was rumored to be the next "magic bullet" for athletes.

Growth hormone had first been isolated during the 1950s and is mostly used to treat dwarfism in children. But a 1990 study among elderly men suggested that regular injections created astounding improvements in their lean muscle tissue, with corresponding decreases in body fat - all without exercise. Researchers estimated that the changes had turned their aging clocks back as much as 20 years.

To Alzado and other athletes, the logic was simple and instructive: If hGH helped little children grow, if it helped flabby old men get lean, imagine what it might do for a well-conditioned athlete. Even though there is no hard medical data on what hGH actually can do for you - or what it can do to you - the early results have been seductive to athletes looking for a chemically induced edge.

The International Olympic Committee is so worried about hGH that it recently recruited Dr. Peter Sonksen, one of the world's leading hormone experts, to join its prestigious Medical Commission. The commission sets IOC drug policy and oversees drug testing at the Olympic Games.

"Growth hormone is probably the most potent anabolic agent yet discovered," says Sonksen, who lives in London. "The potential damage to the Olympic movement is frightening. I know what damage anabolic steroids have done. This is worse."

Huizenga knows about the damage such performance-enhancing drugs can do.

"Lyle is a case history for the stuff," he says today, three years after Alzado's agonizing death from brain cancer. "He was convinced it was working.

"The `in' people - the athletes - they're convinced it works. On the gym floor, the word is out. But this is a hard story. It's still very, very secret."

The secret seems to be out. Even if they won't talk about it, athletes are experimenting with hGH, trying various doses, gauging side effects, testing the limits.

"I know it's being used by athletes; it has been for some time," says Dr. Robert Voy, the former chief medical officer of the U.S. Olympic Committee, who monitored an increasing number of hGH inquiries on the USOC's drug hotline.

"It's very expensive, but a lot of Olympic athletes can afford it. Some of them who've tried it told me they got nothing. Others have had dramatic changes."

Few doctors know much about hGH, because it's so new, it's so expensive and, until now, its use in the United States largely has been confined to pediatric endocrinologists who treat undersized children.

Sonksen is one of the doctors intimate with the power of hGH.

"I'm an endocrinologist, and I use growth hormone therapeutically," Sonksen says. "I know it's a very powerful substance - much more powerful than we ever imagined. And I'm frightened."

Although the IOC has banned the use of hGH, it's something of a hollow prohibition: There is no way to test for it - not in the urine, not in the blood.

Nor is a test on the horizon.

"It's going to take a lot of time, money and research," Sonksen says. "By the Olympics in 2000, I'd like to think we'd have a test, but only if people take it seriously now."

Sonksen and others are careful to point out that though hGH does appear to add muscle and reduce fat, its side effects are largely unknown and there is no scientific evidence to show that it definitely enhances athletic performance.

But the anecdotal evidence is there.

"Most of the people I have interacted with that use growth hormone are professional and world-class athletes," says steroid expert Charles Yesalis, professor of health and human development at Penn State. "These are very intelligent men and women ... who know their bodies probably better than I know my science. And they're convinced it works."

Sonksen says, "An athlete who improves from, say, 9.9 seconds to 9.85, well, he knows he's got something. You might say that's only a marginal gain, but that's the world these athletes live in - the world of marginal gains."

It's known to pediatricians as "cosmetic endocrinology" - the use of growth hormone as a bizarre sort of designer drug used to increase a normal person's size and strength.

Pediatricians say they're coming under more and more pressure from parents who want the hormone prescribed for their normal-sized children. One way or another, these parents want the Olympic motto - faster, higher, stronger - to come true for their children.

While parents presumably want hGH for their children, its anti-aging properties also are bound to appeal to many baby boomers as they slip into middle age and beyond.

Howard Turney, a Houston entrepreneur, opened one of the first "longevity clinics" near Cancun, Mexico. The El Dorado Rejuvenation and Longevity Institute has closed, though Turney says he distributes growth hormone, obtained from European suppliers, to 28 anti-aging clinics across the United States.

Officials at the Food and Drug Administration say this practice is not illegal, though they continue to monitor the situation for possible abuses.

A prominent, upscale anti-aging clinicis operating in Basel, Switzerland, and experts say similar places are bound to spring up in the United States, especially if drug trials at the National Institute on Aging show no serious side effects to the managed use of hGH.

In the meantime, Genetech and Eli Lilly, the only U.S. makers of the drug, have implemented strict controls on the distribution of their synthetic hGH.

The restricted supply has created a highly elaborate and clandestine market for pure hGH. There have been numerous thefts from pharmacies, research labs and doctors' offices, with burglars even bypassing other drugs in favor of hGH.

"Certainly, there have been robberies of pharmacies, and there is a black market out there, but ultimately it's extremely hard to get," says Jim Weiss, a Genetech spokesman.

When vials of hGH - the real thing - began turning up in drug busts of steroid traffickers, the Drug Enforcement Administration began to get serious about tracking growth hormone more closely.

One FDA official says Texas has a particularly big problem with contraband hGH because of "a lot of physicians down there who don't ask a whole lot of questions."

Although the use of hGH is supposedly limited to patients with documented hormone deficiencies, it is not illegal for any doctor to prescribe it.

"It's perfectly legal," says Huizenga, Alzado's former physician, who practices in Beverly Hills, Calif. "It just blows my mind that this stuff is legal for me to prescribe."

The FDA official says illegal hGH comes into the United States "through every port of entry," and most of the contraband hGH used in Texas comes through Mexico: "They don't have the distribution controls in Mexico that we have. You can get a prescription from a doctor there - or buy a prescription from a guy who calls himself a doctor - and bring the stuff home with you.

"We know the DEA is very interested."

Tommy Chaikin, a former defensive lineman at South Carolina, has written about his suicidal spiral after he began abusing steroids and hGH in college.

His first encounter with hGH was in 1985, soon after synthetic growth hormone came onto the market.

"Getting the stuff (steroids and hormone) was no big deal," he wrote in a first-person story in Sports Illustrated in 1988. "Some bodybuilders take $10,000 worth . . . but I only got $800 worth, enough for 10 injections over eight weeks.

"Tunnel vision had set in. My attitude was: Just give me what it takes to get big."

Mike Wise went down that same tunnel.

A former defensive lineman with the Raiders, Wise was a steroid user who Huizenga suspected was using hGH as well.

The doctor says he was alerted to Wise's condition when he noticed the player's forehead was beginning to protrude - one of the signs of acromegaly, a hormonal side effect known as Frankenstein Syndrome.

"He finally went to a plastic surgeon," Huizenga says, "to have his forehead shaved down."

Although it's not clear that Wise suffered depression from his use of hGH and other performance-enhancing drugs, he eventually committed suicide.

"You hear a lot of spooky stories about bone growth," says a veteran NFL strength coach who requested he not be identified, "but I don't hear much about guys using (hGH). Maybe I'm naive."

Maybe so. Huizenga says he knew seven Raiders who were regular hGH users, and after he left the team other players came to him "freely admitting their use."

Al LoCasale, the Raiders' executive assistant, declined to comment on Dr. Huizenga's remarks.

He said the doctor had been "dismissed by the club ... and we've never given much shrift to what he says."

Although Huizenga says he can't document hGH use among the Raiders when he was with the club, he remains convinced that "growth hormone misuse (in the NFL) was at epidemic levels."

Sports medicine professionals are certain that athletes are out there "field-testing" hGH, stacking it in combination with other drugs, just as they tinkered with steroids.

"I think that's true, very definitely," says Voy, the former USOC drug chief. "The athletes are walking laboratories. They probably know more than the endocrinologists."

And what of the future for Olympic drug testing, for biochemical cheating, for a level playing field in international sports?

"It's still cops and robbers," Voy says. "And the robbers are winning."