Is Your IGF-1 Too High on Growth Hormone? (The Bell Curve Risk)

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Is Your IGF-1 Too High on Growth Hormone? The Bell Curve Risk Explained

All right, the question is his IGF-1 test came back at 510. He's on 1.5 IU of GH per day and on TRT. What do I make of that? What I make of that is you are in a good place, with one number worth watching.

Before getting into that number, the chain matters. Growth hormone comes out of the pituitary in pulses, mostly at night, and most of what it does it does indirectly, because it travels to the liver and tells the liver to produce something called IGF-1, which is insulin-like growth factor 1, the signal that actually drives tissue growth and repair. So when you inject GH, you are not really measuring GH. You are measuring what your liver did with it.

510 IGF-1 level is very high, especially for somebody who's just trying to like optimize natural levels.

That number tells you something about the person, not just the dose. 1.5 IU is a modest amount, and on a modest amount you would normally expect a modest bump.

What it sounds like is that you were already producing a significant amount of GH and now you're adding the autogenous GH and it's just elevating your levels and or you're a hyper responder to the growth hormone.

Hyper response comes down to how many GH receptors your liver has, how sensitive they are, and how much insulin is around, because insulin and GH work together at the liver to drive IGF-1 output. Someone lean, well fed, training hard and on TRT has a liver primed to respond, so the same injection that moves one guy from 180 to 240 moves another from 280 to 510.

The only thing to consider is like the studies that we have of the risk of higher IGF-1 is it has a bell curve, meaning higher cardiac risk at low levels of IGF-1 and then when we're around that 300 range, this is considered optimal.

The low end carries risk because IGF-1 supports the lining of your blood vessels and keeps tissue repair running, and when it drops too far that repair capacity goes with it. And then the higher we go, especially beyond 500, that's when you start to assume that same risk again, because IGF-1 is a growth signal, and a growth signal turned up for years tells everything to grow, including cardiac muscle and including cells you would rather not encourage.

Worth saying plainly: most of what we have on this comes from population data in people with naturally high or naturally low IGF-1, not from men running GH on purpose. The shape of the curve is reasonably well described. The exact risk at 510 on exogenous GH is not.

In my mind, if you are somebody who again, is just looking to optimize, feel good, perform your best, get some results, you know, mid 30s, mid 40s, 510 level of IGF-1 is probably a little bit too high.

The adjustment is small. Drop to one IU a day, hold it, and retest in five or six weeks, because IGF-1 moves slowly and a two week retest tells you almost nothing. Most people land in the 300s on that change, which is where you still get the recovery, the sleep quality and the body composition shift without pushing the growth signal past where the data gets uncomfortable.

While you wait, watch the things that travel with high IGF-1. Fasting glucose, fasting insulin, blood pressure, and whether your hands feel puffy or your wrists ache when you wake up, because those show up before any marker does.

But honestly, man, like if you feel great, your blood pressure's fine, all of your other blood markers on your CMP are fine, I would say keep going, bro.

There is a lot more of this inside the free community, and it is genuinely free, so if you want somewhere to ask the follow-up question the men's group is here: https://www.skool.com/jh-iron-forge-brotherhood/about