get someone to lie to you.
Men who thought they'd been given human growth hormone improved their athletic performance on a jumping test, even though they'd gotten a placebo instead, a new study shows.
The research was presented in San Francisco on Tuesday at the annual conference of the Endocrine Society, whose members include doctors and researchers who focus on hormones.
It underscores the power of the placebo, a "medicine" that's really nothing at all, said Dr. Ken Ho, the study's senior author and a professor of endocrinology at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney, Australia.
He joked at a news conference that he's thinking about getting a placebo patent.
More seriously, Ho and other doctors said, the study illustrates the folly of people taking potentially dangerous substances with poorly understood benefits -- if any at all.
Although the Australian study is small, it offers an important message to young athletes who might be tempted to try a drug or supplement because some sports superstar took it, said Dr. Todd Weitzenberg, a Kaiser Permanente sports medicine specialist in Santa Rosa.
"Believing in yourself is a powerful training aid" -- and safer than any drug, Weitzenberg said.
Ho's study, sponsored in part by Australia's government and the World Anti-Doping Agency, enrolled 64 amateur athletes who were told they'd get either human growth hormone -- rumored to improve athletic performance -- or a placebo.
The athletes' strength, endurance, power and sprint capacity were measured at the beginning of the study, and again after eight weeks of treatment.
Before the second test, people were asked to guess which substance they'd gotten. The men who thought they had been given growth hormone improved twice as much on the power test -- a series of jumps -- as those who thought they hadn't, Ho said.
Women's performance wasn't affected by what they believed they'd been given. In another quirk, men were much more likely than women to think they'd gotten the real thing.
Researchers are still analyzing the performance of the athletes who actually were given growth hormone. To see more of The Sacramento Bee, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.sacbee.com/. Copyright (c) 2008, The Sacramento Bee, Calif. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.
Copyright (C) 2008 The Sacramento Bee, Calif.