Sermorelin common uses, half-life, side effects and more

Sermorelin is the first 29 amino acids of the hormone the brain uses to tell the pituitary to release growth hormone. It was an approved drug for eighteen years for diagnosing and treating growth hormone deficiency in children. The company stopped making it in 2008 and the approval was withdrawn in 2009 for commercial reasons rather than safety. It is now made by compounding pharmacies on prescription and also sold as an unregulated research chemical. Adults take it for sleep, recovery, and body composition. No trial has measured any of those.

• Raising growth hormone without injecting growth hormone itself
• Sleep quality and depth
• Recovery and body composition in adults
• Growth hormone deficiency in children (the approved use)
• Testing whether the pituitary still responds (the other approved use)
• Stacking with a ghrelin receptor agonist

Once daily at bedtime

Community and clinic practice is 200 to 300 mcg under the skin once a day at bedtime. Reports run from 100 mcg on older bodybuilding forums up to 500 mcg on newer ones. The one peer-reviewed source that catalogued the 200 to 300 mcg figure classed it as self-reported online dosing rather than a clinical recommendation. The approved dose for children was 30 mcg per kg under the skin at bedtime. The diagnostic dose was 1 mcg per kg into a vein. Injection under the skin needs roughly ten times the intravenous dose for the same growth hormone response. People commonly run five days on and two off. Others run three to six months on and about a month off.

• Bedtime dosing on an empty stomach lines up with the natural overnight growth hormone pulse and no study has tested that timing against any other
• People commonly draw it into the same injection as ipamorelin and no study has ever tested that pairing

Sermorelin clears from the blood within minutes. The best retrievable human measurement is 4.3 minutes, taken from an intravenous infusion in ten healthy men. A figure of 11 to 12 minutes circulates widely and traces only to a label that can no longer be retrieved from any archive. The claim that about 6 percent of a skin injection reaches the blood has no human study behind it. The nearest real figures are 4 to 5 percent in rats and 3 to 5 percent by nose in people.

The original approved label called for the reconstituted solution to be used the same day. Compounding pharmacies now dispense it with a 28 day discard date after the vial is first punctured.

• Redness, itching, or swelling at the injection site
• Flushing or warmth shortly after the injection
• Headache
• Drowsiness when it is dosed at bedtime
• Antibodies to the peptide that formed in a third to three quarters of children on it without affecting their growth

Sermorelin is the first 29 amino acids of the hormone the brain uses to tell the pituitary to release growth hormone. It activates the same receptor on the pituitary and triggers a pulse of the body's own growth hormone. That raises IGF-1 from the liver. The effect is capped by what your own pituitary can produce. An enzyme clips it between the second and third amino acid within minutes. That clip is what makes it short-acting and the longer-lasting analogs built from it all block it. Growth hormone release stays pulsatile rather than flattening into a plateau. The response held up over twelve months in children and two weeks in adults with nothing looking further out.

Sermorelin was an approved drug for growth hormone deficiency in children and the trial behind that approval enrolled 110 of them. That trial was open-label with no control group and compared each child against their own growth before treatment. Growth velocity rose from 4.1 to 8.0 cm a year at six months then fell back to 7.2 at twelve. About a quarter of the children did not respond. The one trial that compared it head to head against growth hormone itself found growth hormone won by a wide margin. Final adult height was never measured in any sermorelin trial. Adult evidence is far thinner at fewer than fifty people across three studies from the 1990s. Only one was placebo-controlled and its benefit showed up in the nine men rather than the ten women. Nothing adults take it for now has been measured, including sleep, fat loss, and anything past sixteen weeks.

• Compounded sermorelin has been recalled 92 times since 2012 across at least 30 pharmacies, almost always for failing sterility checks
• It is banned in sport at all times and is named on the prohibited list
• Growth hormone and IGF-1 drive cell growth so it is not for anyone with a current or past cancer
• No adult study has run longer than sixteen weeks so nothing is known about years of continuous use
• Avoid it in pregnancy and breastfeeding since no data exist in any species
• Research-chemical material sold as sermorelin is not made to pharmacy standards so its identity and purity are unverified