Growth hormone
Reads: Growth hormone
You do not take this; you earn it. Its biggest pulse of the day arrives about an hour after you fall asleep, and it answers to sleep, exercise and fasting. Note the catch on the pathway below: more growth hormone does not automatically mean more IGF-1, because the liver has to be listening.
What this marker reads
Growth hormone — released in pulses from the pituitary, largest during deep sleep, and the signal that drives IGF-1 production.
No body publishes a range for this marker
Growth hormone is secreted in pulses, which is why diagnosis rests on provocative testing rather than a resting draw. Every published growth-hormone figure is a stimulation-test cut-point for suspected pituitary disease. None of them applies to a blood draw, and no reference interval exists.
Your laboratory reads your result against its own assay, and this page does not do that for it. What is above is what a named body published and for whom; the machinery this marker reads is set out on its pathway page, and the formulas witnessed on it are below.
The machinery behind it
What raises this marker and what it goes on to move — each edge carried with its own study — is set out in full on its pathway page: Growth hormone →
Formulas that modulate it
Each formula page names this pathway and carries the study behind its claim.
Build a combo from your panel
Open the bloodwork builder and select every marker your lab flagged — it covers the most machinery with the fewest formulas.