What is it about?
Like electric cables, nerve cells also possess a sheath (the myelin sheath). In the course of some neurological diseases, this myelin sheath can be damaged and affected persons have troubles moving and/or sensing their body, because the nerves cannot properly deliver information to the muscles or, for instance, from the skin, without this sheath. One of these diseases is called Guillain-Barré-syndrome (GBS). In GBS, the patient’s own immune system attacks the myelin sheaths of the peripheral nerves. After such an attack, the body usually recovers well, but this takes time. Here, we showed in one young patient that the recovery could potentially be accelerated using medication. The medication was a hormone called Human Growth Hormone. We tracked the muscular strength and its increase over the course of approximately one year. At half-time, we injected this hormone over the course of ten weeks and observed an increase in strength gain during that period. We believe that the hormone was helping to rebuild the myelin sheath, because although we observed an increased strength gain, we did not see an increased gain of body mass, which implied that the muscles did not grow bigger, but the signal conduction in the peripheral nervous system improved by better myelination of the nerve cells.
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Why is it important?
In such demyelinating diseases, we are usually only able to give medication that aims to reduce the damage. This report delivers first evidence that medication can also help to recover.
Perspectives
Since this is a report of only one patient, we need to conduct further studies to examine if the therapeutic use of growth hormone could become a clinical standard. Further, we need to find out if the approach would also work in diseases with demyelination within the central nervous system (brain and spinal cord), like, for instance, multiple sclerosis. Of course, such medication would always be complementary (and not alternatively) to movement therapy.
Philipp Gulde
Technical University of Munich
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Can Growth Hormone Lead to a Faster Recovery from Guillain-Barré Syndrome? Case Report of the First Therapeutic Use in One Patient, Case Reports in Neurology, June 2023, Karger Publishers,
DOI: 10.1159/000530065.
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