The current blood test for HGH has significant shortcomings and is still not available for widespread implementation, anti-doping officials say, and a urine test has yet to be developed. The detection constraints, doping officials acknowledge, mean the blood test would be useless at major sporting events such as the Olympics because athletes could stop taking the drug just before competition. It is not known how many athletes are using HGH, although the report on performance-enhancing drugs in professional baseball released last week highlighted the popularity of the drug among major league players, many of whom switched from steroids to HGH after baseball instituted a drug-testing program in 2003. As soon as a synthetic form of HGH, which is known as recombinant growth hormone (rHGH), was released in 1985 to treat patients with growth hormone deficiency or wasting diseases such as AIDS, anti-doping officials anticipated it would be obtained by athletes seeking to increase muscle mass or speed recovery from injury. Major League Baseball and the NFL are jointly funding research by noted anti-doping chemist Don Catlin into developing a urine test for HGH, but several chemists expressed skepticism that such a test would ever be perfected because the substance is found in only trace amounts in urine. The slow pace in developing an effective test for a substance that has been the subject of nearly a dozen research projects in the last decade reflects the difficulty in detecting synthetic HGH in the blood, unforeseen problems over the last three years in getting a pharmaceutical company to mass-produce the test, and disputes within the scientific community over the type of test that should be developed. read more
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