Before You Inject Those 'Peptides!...'

Until we see the day that the FDA is dismantled and replaced by a number of competing, credible private watchdog groups, standards bodies, or something like a Consumers Union or Underwriters Laboratories, it will be what practically everyone relies upon for guidance about the safety and efficacy of drugs.

This is part of why having a single government agency is so dangerous to your health: It's a single point of failure that can be made to fail by politicians -- as it is doing so today under Donald Trump, through his reckless appointment of Bobby Kennedy, Jr. as the head of the HHS.

Case in point: Kennedy is working to give the FDA's imprimatur to a number of fashionable nostrums:

RFK Jr is trying to get 14 peptides, without data on safety or efficacy, licensed and approved by FDA. His favorite is BPC-157. "Only three small human studies of BPC-157 exist, for instance, the largest of which is a telephone survey of 16 people who received an injection of the drug for knee pain, and which was published in a third-tier journal, Alternative Therapies."

Regulars here will know that I am both an advocate of one's freedom to use oneself as a guinea pig if one wants and a proponent of making informed decisions about such things.

So it is that, since "peptides" are all the rage these days, I was glad to see Derek Lowe, a research chemist, write about this fad and how dangerous it can be.

After first giving a good general introduction to the scientific meaning of the term peptide in his trademark relatable and humorous way, Lowe gets into the nitty-gritty of using them as therapies, including a discussion of a treatment that is often abused:

And there are going to be plenty of cases where yes, Peptide X sure does do that thing you're interested in, but it turns out that you can't do That Thing without doing other things that you are surely not interested in. A number of "peptides of abuse" these days, for example, seem to be targeting human growth hormone pathways and associated ones, so let's use that as an example. The pitch is often something like "Here's the signal your body uses to build muscle! Take it directly and get going today!", and with HGH there's also been a longstanding subculture that treats it as a Fountain of Youth signal of some kind. "Replenish your growth hormone levels", the idea is, "and dial back the biological clock!"

But growth hormone (and I shouldn't have to say this) is powerful stuff, and it doesn't just go tell your muscles to swell up. It affects bone tissue and many other tissues as well. I would invite anyone looking to maximize their growth hormone levels to look up a condition called acromegaly, which is what you get when your body keeps on making more growth hormone than you strictly need. Bones in the hands, feet, and head enlarge, and you get all sorts of side effects like joint pain, high blood pressure, type II diabetes, and other things that are probably not mentioned in the peptide supplier's brochure.

Excess growth hormone also increases the risk of some types of cancer... [bold added]

Lowe also notably gets into that fave of Bobby K Junior's, "BPC-157."

Lowe ends with his defense of the FDA, which I would heavily qualify as I did at the beginning of this post. To the extent that so many people rely on the FDA for information about drug efficacy and safety in the world as it is today, though, he is spot on.

Trump's appointment of Kennedy is dangerous for that reason and, in my view, is a reason we would work to build strong, competing, non-governmental institutions that inform the public about drug safety and efficacy.

-- CAV