growth hormone therapy for degenerative disc disease
Reports of rapidly progressive and fatal degenerative neurologic disorders in three recipients of human growth hormone (hGH) have been received by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). In two cases, diagnoses of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) were made at autopsy.All three patients had had growth failure secondary to growth hormone deficiency. They had been treated during childhood and adolescence with hGH extracted from pooled human cadaver pituitary glands.he average duration of therapy was 4 years. Each patient received hormone from two or three batches per year. Each batch was derived from a pool of approximately 16,000 cadaver pituitary glands. The three patients described here received hGH for 14, 8, and 6 years, respectively.