Compound
Everything we've written on IGF-1 — 18 articles covering the mechanism, the evidence, comparisons, and practical considerations.
18 articles
Immune modulationBreast cancer survivorship and peptides — the hormone-sensitive cancer considerationsTreatment is finished. The oncologist said the words you waited to hear, and you walked out of that final appointment into a world that expected you to feel relief. Maybe you did feel relief. But underneath it — or alongside it, or sometimes instead of it — there was something else. Fatigue that doesn't lift the way it should. Joints that ache in the morning like you've aged a decade in two years. Hot flashes that interrupt sleep and punctuate the workday with unwelcome intensity. A body that feels estranged from itself, managed by the medications keeping you well, altered by the treatments that got you here.9 min readImmune modulationCancer survivorship and peptides — what to know about growth-promoting compounds after diagnosisThe scan came back clear. You've crossed some threshold that felt, before you crossed it, like it would change everything — and it has, in some ways, but you're still in your body, still dealing with what the treatment left behind. The fatigue that doesn't resolve. The weight that redistributed. The joint aches that arrived with chemotherapy and stayed long past the infusion suite. You've started paying attention to longevity in a way you never did before a diagnosis, because you understand now in a visceral way that you didn't before that the body is not a given. And you've started hearing about peptides.9 min readGrowth hormone and recoveryCJC-1295 with DAC — what the half-life extension actually changesThe problem with most peptides as drugs is that they fall apart before they can do their job. Inject a peptide into the subcutaneous tissue, and between the proteases in the interstitial fluid, the peptides circulating in the blood, and the rapid renal clearance of small molecules, what you've injected may have a measurable half-life measured in minutes. Endogenous GHRH — the hypothalamic signal that drives GH release — survives fewer than ten minutes in circulation. Sermorelin, the pharmaceutical GHRH fragment, is similarly short-lived. These are not defects so much as features of the natural pulsatile system, but they create a significant practical problem if you want a compound that lasts long enough to be administered once a week instead of three times a day.8 min readGrowth hormone and recoveryDAC vs no DAC — what the half-life difference means in practiceYou've done enough reading to know there are two versions. CJC-1295 with DAC and CJC-1295 without DAC — also called Mod GRF 1-29, also called Modified GRF 1-29, also found in enough abbreviations and vendor names that the nomenclature itself starts to feel like a test. You've probably seen protocols recommending one and protocols recommending the other, sometimes with confidence that feels disproportionate to the evidence available. The distinction between them is real and pharmacologically significant. But it's a trade-off, not a verdict.7 min readPeptide scienceThe GH-IGF-1 axis in plain EnglishYou've seen the phrase "GH levels" on clinic websites and in longevity content until it's become a kind of shorthand for youthfulness — the thing that goes down as you age and takes everything else with it. What that framing almost never explains is that "GH levels" is itself a misleading concept, because growth hormone doesn't really have a level in the way that testosterone or thyroid hormone does. GH is pulsatile. It's released in bursts. Most of the day, it's nearly undetectable in the bloodstream. And much of what gets attributed to GH — the tissue growth, the protein synthesis, the metabolic shifts, the cellular maintenance — isn't actually done by GH at all. It's done by a different hormone that GH triggers downstream. Understanding the actual architecture of this system is what makes every conversation about GH-related interventions either sensible or confused.9 min readGrowth hormone and recoveryHow to read your IGF-1 lab — what the number actually tells youYou've been on a GH-axis peptide protocol for eight weeks. You get your labs back. There's a number — IGF-1, 187 ng/mL — and next to it a reference range that tells you you're normal. Or maybe you're slightly above normal. Or maybe you're right in the middle and your provider's office calls it fine. And you're sitting there trying to figure out whether "fine" actually means anything, whether this number went up from wherever you started, whether you're in the right place or the wrong one, and what you're actually looking at.8 min readOrigins and discoveryIGF-1 and bodybuilding — the history of an underground drugIn the mid-1980s, a certain kind of physique started appearing on competitive bodybuilding stages that hadn't been there before. The bodies were larger, yes — that trajectory had been underway since the 1950s — but the change in the 1980s was qualitative, not just quantitative. The abdomens were distended in ways that seemed to contradict the body fat percentages on stage. The internal density was different. The growth had a character that steroids alone, which the sport had used openly since the 1960s, didn't quite explain. Competitors and coaches began whispering about growth hormone, which had recently become available in synthetic recombinant form. They were right about GH. But they were, in a specific technical sense, also wrong about what was doing most of the work.8 min readGrowth hormone and recoveryIGF-1 LR3 in plain English — what an engineered IGF-1 actually doesYour doctor tells you your IGF-1 is on the low end of normal. You nod, leave the office, and spend the next hour trying to understand what that actually means. The name is impenetrable — Insulin-like Growth Factor 1 — and every search result either leads to pediatric growth disorders or to bodybuilding forums full of syringe photos. The two contexts seem completely unrelated, and yet they're orbiting the same molecule for overlapping reasons that are worth understanding clearly.8 min readMetabolic healthInsulin signaling and aging — from C. elegans to human metabolic diseaseIn 1993, a developmental biologist at the University of California San Francisco named Cynthia Kenyon made an observation that should have seemed impossible. She mutated a single gene in a millimeter-long nematode worm called Caenorhabditis elegans, a creature with a normal lifespan of roughly three weeks, and the worm lived twice as long. Not marginally longer. Twice as long. The gene was daf-2, the worm's equivalent of the insulin and IGF-1 receptor, and the mutation reduced its activity. The worm didn't just survive longer — it remained active and youthful longer, compressing its period of deterioration rather than extending it. Kenyon later described the moment as the discovery that aging was subject to genetic regulation, not merely the inevitable accumulation of wear. The implication was enormous: if a single signaling pathway could gate the lifespan of an organism, then aging was not a passive process. It was regulated. And what is regulated can, in principle, be intervened upon.7 min readGrowth hormone and recoveryMGF and PEG-MGF — the IGF-1 splice variant that turns on after exerciseTwo days after a particularly hard leg session — the kind where you went heavier than you planned and your form started to slide in the last few sets — the soreness is deep. Not the surface ache of muscles that worked hard, but the dense stiffness of tissue that was genuinely stressed. Your quads feel thick. Your hamstrings are tight in the belly of the muscle. This is not injury, exactly. It's the signature of damage that your body is in the process of repairing, and if the biology goes the way it should, you'll come back slightly stronger for it. The question exercise physiologists have spent decades trying to answer is: how does the muscle know to repair rather than just scar?8 min readGrowth hormone and recoveryThe MK-677 water retention conversationYou've been on MK-677 for three weeks and the scale is up four pounds. Your face looks slightly different in the morning — a little puffier, a little softer around the jaw. Your rings are harder to get off. Your ankles feel subtly heavy. You didn't change your diet. You're sleeping better, possibly. But the four pounds don't feel like muscle. They feel like something else.7 min readImmune modulationPeptides during active cancer treatment — what to discontinue, what may be appropriateYou were on a peptide protocol when you got the diagnosis. Or you finished your last infusion two weeks ago and someone in a Facebook group mentioned peptides for recovery. Or you're on maintenance immunotherapy, feeling well enough to think about optimization again, and you want to know if anything from the world you were exploring before is still on the table. The oncology appointments are thorough, but nobody has addressed this specifically, and you're not sure whether to bring it up or how.9 min readImmune modulationProstate cancer survivorship and peptides — the androgen-sensitive considerationsThe treatment worked. That's the sentence you held onto through surgery or radiation, through the PSA monitoring and the waiting, through whatever form the treatment took. And now you're on the other side of it, which is supposed to feel like a return to normal. Except your body doesn't quite feel like normal. The fatigue is different from what you expected — not the sharp tiredness of someone who didn't sleep, but a flat, low-energy baseline that seems to have settled in. The body composition has shifted in ways you didn't anticipate: muscle harder to maintain, fat redistributing in patterns you don't recognize. Sometimes the mood is off. Sometimes cognition feels less crisp. If you've been on androgen deprivation therapy, some of what you're experiencing is the documented physiological consequence of that treatment, and it is more significant than most men are told before they start.9 min readMetabolic healthWhat people are reporting about Tesamorelin for visceral fatThis article summarizes experiences reported in public online communities including Reddit, longevity forums, and discussion boards. We are not advocating human use of any compound discussed here. Many of the peptides discussed are not FDA-approved for the uses described, and some are explicitly not approved for human or veterinary use. What follows is a synthesis of what people have reported, presented to give readers context on the public conversation — not as guidance, not as evidence of safety or efficacy, and not as a recommendation. Decisions about any compound should be made with a qualified prescribing provider after a full medical evaluation.8 min readCompounding and complianceWhat to test before starting any peptide — the labwork that mattersYou've found a clinician, you have a protocol in mind, and someone has mentioned that you should get some labs done before starting. Maybe the clinic sent you a short requisition. Maybe you're wondering whether that short list is actually enough, or whether there's a more complete picture you should have before you begin. The honest answer is that most peptide protocols start with inadequate baseline labwork — not because the information doesn't matter, but because patients don't always know to push for it, and some clinics don't build their intake process around it.9 min readCompounding and complianceWhen peptide stacks go wrong — the failure modes and how to recognize themIt starts reasonably. You add BPC-157 for a tendon issue, it seems to help, and you get interested. A few months later you're running BPC-157 and TB-500 together because someone on a forum explained the synergy. Then sermorelin for GH support. Then ipamorelin because the half-life stacks better with CJC-1295. Then Selank because the sermorelin is affecting your sleep. Then GHK-Cu for the skin benefit you read about. You're now six compounds in, spending more per month than your gym membership, injecting twice daily, and you can't quite articulate whether you feel better or just feel like you're doing something.9 min readCompounding and complianceWhen to escalate from peptide protocols to specialist evaluationYou've been on a peptide protocol for three months. The original complaint — persistent joint pain, slow recovery, poor sleep, cognitive fog — was real, you had a provider conversation, and the protocol seemed reasonable for what you were trying to address. But the symptom is still there. Or it changed but didn't resolve. Or you feel roughly the same and you're not sure whether that's the protocol working to maintain a baseline, or the protocol doing nothing, or something else going on that the protocol was never positioned to fix.9 min readCompounding and complianceWhen to stop a peptide protocol — the conditions that warrant reassessmentThere's a clear narrative for starting a peptide protocol. You do the research, you find a clinician, you get your labs, you start. The community around this space has well-worn language for beginning. Stopping, though, doesn't have the same story. The cultural pressure runs toward continuation — you've invested, you believe in the mechanism, you're waiting for the effect to arrive — and there's very little structure for the decision to stop or reassess. That asymmetry is worth examining directly, because it's where a lot of time and money quietly disappear.9 min read