In a report released Tuesday, a team from the Medical School debunked the popular assumption that growth hormones slow the aging process. The Stanford study, conducted over the last two years, showed that in addition to only marginal benefits, growth hormones can actually put users at risk for a number of ailments including diabetes, carpal tunnel syndrome and joint swelling.

“All of our research suggested that the growth hormone therapy had modest benefits but the possibility of serious side effects,” said Medical Fellow Hau Liu, the lead author of the study. “People are paying hundreds to thousands of dollars a month for this kind of therapy — for hormones that should really not be used for this purpose. This is not the magic bullet everyone thinks it is.”

Liu found that while the drug can minimally build muscle and decrease body fat, it does not improve bone density, cholesterol or maximum oxygen consumption.

“Overall, your weight, bone density and stamina don’t change, and there is no evidence to suggest that growth hormones given to a healthy person will lead to a longer life,” Liu said.

According to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2005, the number of people in the United States using growth hormone therapy for its supposed anti-aging benefits had topped 30,000.

Federal regulators approve of the use of growth hormones as a treatment for children and other patients with growth problems, but forbid commercial distribution of the drug for anti-aging purposes.

“It is illegal for drug companies to distribute any drugs that are not under FDA approval and anti-aging does not fall under FDA usage,” Liu said. “So no drug company is really going to try and refute us.”

However, this technical legal block has not prevented doctors from prescribing it to an increasing number of elderly patients, despite costs exceeding $1,000 a month.

“If you went to a gym pretty regularly, you could get the same changes without breaking into too much of a sweat, and you wouldn’t spend $1,000 to $2,000 per month,” Liu said.

Over the course of two years, Liu and his team examined 31 medical studies published around the world, focusing on more than 500 elderly patients who underwent at least six months of growth hormone therapy to treat effects of aging.

“When we started the project, we were specifically interested in understanding both the potential benefits and harms associated with the use of growth hormone on the healthy elderly,” said Dena Bravata, a senior research scientist at the Medical School and one of the seven researchers of the study. “We designed the study, a meta-analysis of the published literature on the use of growth hormone in this population, to specifically look for both potential positive and negative effects.”

Liu said he was surprised at the limited amount of research that had been done in this field.

“We found only 18 unique studies that included a little more than 200 tried patients,” Liu said.

Bravata attributed the popularity of the false myth to healthy individuals extrapolating the hormone’s positive edge on hormone-deficient patients to the general population.

“When someone whose growth hormone level is low is given the hormone, they increase muscle mass, decrease fat mass and increase stamina,” Bravata said.

Liu pointed to a 1990 study as the primary source of popular assumptions.

“In the Journal of Medicine in 1990, they wrote about the effect of growth hormones in 12 elderly men, and found slight changes in body composition and skin,” Liu said. “Many proponents have locked on to this study and that’s probably how the whole idea came into fruition. However, the results were clearly preliminary and the authors of the study suggested that a lot more research had to be done.”