News - Women With Fibromyalgia Have Impaired Growth Hormone Secretion

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Women With Fibromyalgia Have Impaired Growth Hormone Secretion

A DGReview of : " Impaired growth hormone secretion in fibromyalgia patients:

Evidence for augmented hypothalamic somatostatin tone "

Arthritis & Rheumatism

05/22/2002

By Anne MacLennan

Women with fibromyalgia have an impaired growth hormone response to exercise

that is reversible with pyridostigmine.

This impaired response exists even in fibromyalgia (FM) patients with normal

levels of insulin-like growth factor-one (IGF-one), S. Paiva and

colleagues from Oregon Health Sciences University, Portland, Oregon, United

States, have found.

Because pyridostigmine reduces somatostatin tone, this defective growth

hormone (GH) response may result from higher levels of somatostatin, a

hypothalamic hormone that inhibits GH secretion, these authors surmise.

The two-fold objective of this study was to determine the GH response to

acute exercise stressor in female FM patients and to assess the importance

of somatostatin tone in the generation of this response.

Twenty women with FM and 10 healthy female controls, all of whom exercised

on a treadmill to their own idea of exhaustion, were monitored for pulse,

blood pressure, electrocardiography, oxygen uptake, carbon dioxide output,

anaerobic threshold and maximal workload. Researchers drew blood for GH and

cortisol measures one hour before exercise, and then again immediately

before, immediately after and one hour after exercise.

This entire procedure was precisely repeated one month later, except now all

of the women received pyridostigmine bromide (Mestinon; 30 mg orally) one

hour before exercise.

Although FM patients versus controls showed no GH or cortisol response to

exercise, their GH levels increased eight-fold after receiving the

pyridostigmine to a value comparable with that of controls.

In the FM patients, pyridostigmine did not increase the cortisol response to

exercise and did not alone stimulate GH secretion, nor did it improve

exercise-induced GH secretion in controls.

FM patients with normal IGF-one levels were also found to have an impaired

GH response to exercise.

Arthritis & Rheumatism Volume 46, Issue 5, 2002. Pages: 1344-1350.