Wishful thinking
Men who think they are getting growth hormone score higher in power jump
By Nathan Seppa
Here’s more proof that it’s all in your head.
Guys who receive an inert shot that might or might not be growth hormone are more likely than women to believe it’s the real thing, a new study finds. What’s more, men who got fake shots actually scored higher on a jumping test than they did in previous tests, researchers from Australia report.
Ken Ho, an endocrinologist at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research and at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, and his colleagues randomly assigned 64 recreational athletes to receive a series of injections over eight weeks. Half got growth hormone, the others a placebo.
At the end of the study, among people receiving placebos, 81 percent of men but only 31 percent of women believed they were getting the real thing. Also, those men scored significantly higher on a jump height test than they had before getting the fake shots.