It turns out that:
IGF-1 is “just like giving someone human growth hormone (HGH),” said Don Catlin, the former head of U.C.L.A.’s Olympic Analytical Lab, best known for breaking the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative doping ring. “It goes to the same kinds of RECEPTORS and turns them on.”
While IGF-1 could help athletes in theory, said Dr. Alan Rogol, a vice president of the Endocrine Society, there are no scientific studies with humans to show the expected effects actually occur.
In animals, if IGF-1 is injected into the body, muscles grow. If an animal is produced with genes that cause one muscle to overproduce IGF-1, that muscle grows, and if a tendon is injured, IGF-1 speeds healing.
One of the two tests used to detect growth hormone should also detect abuse of IGF-1. It’s called the marker test and what it actually measures is not growth hormone but growth hormone’s effects — an INCREASE IN IGF-1 and an INCREASE IN ONE OF THE METABOLITES RELEASED WHEN THE TENDON IS BEING REPAIRED.
The other growth hormone test, the isoform test, looks directly for the hormone and so it would not pick up IGF-1.
IGF-1 is made in response to growth hormone and is needed for growth hormone to have its effects on muscles and other tissues.
Growth hormone is synthesized in the pituitary gland, and then travels to the liver, which then responds by producing IGF-1. The IGF-1 is bound to binding proteins in the PLASMA. Therefore, PLATELET RICH PLASMA (PRP) INJECTIONS CONTAIN CONCENTRATED AMOUNTS OF GROWTH FACTORS SUCH AS IGF-1. (Whoops for wejo)
Long arginine 3-IGF-1, abbreviated as IGF-1 LR3 or LR3-IGF-1, is a synthetic protein and lengthened analogue of human insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1). It is a favorite of a duck at the LetsRun.com
It differs from native IGF-1 in that it possesses an arginine instead of a glutamic acid at the third position in its amino acid sequence ("arginine 3"), and also has an additional 13 amino acids at its N-terminus (MFPAMPLLSLFVN) ("long"), for a total of 83 amino acids (relative to the 70 of IGF-1).
The consequences of these modifications are that IGF-1 LR3 retains the pharmacological activity of IGF-1 as an agonist of the IGF-1 receptor, has very low affinity for the insulin-like growth factor-binding proteins (IGFBPs) in the plasma, and has improved metabolic stability. As a result, it is approximately three times more potent than IGF-1, and possesses a significantly longer half-life of about 20–30 hours (relative to IGF-1's half-life of about 12–15 hours).
Both growth hormone and IGF-1 are expensive, he added. Each may cost more than $25,000 a year for a child who is using one of the drugs for legitimate reasons. Athletes may use five or 10 times as much IGF-1 or growth hormone because they are bigger and use higher doses.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/30/sports/igf-1-has-long-been-banned-as-performance-enhancer.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/15/sports/15doctor.html
LetsRun.com:
"...As we’ve written about in the past, LetsRun.com founder Weldon Johnson visited doctor Anthony Galea in Canada for treatment, and Galea was later busted for importing HGH into the US and Weldon didn’t dope."
"And Aden himself has not yet been convicted — though things obviously look very bad for him. Yet on the other side of the coin, associations do matter — if they didn’t, British Athletics would not be going to such great lengths to deny an association with Aden?"
Whoops.
This does not look good for Mr. Weldon Johnson.
It looks like there are several dopers who work at LetsRun.com
It is just a Coincidental Synchronicity™.
ha ha ha
