STRONGER FOR LONGER

www.times.co.uk/health - Times Online: "1980s: the first reports emerge of natural HGH being used by athletes and bodybuilders. Doctors discover that some supplies of HGH have been contaminated with incurable Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease

1986: Synthetic HGH, containing all 191 amino acids of natural HGH, is produced by scientists from Eli Lilly, a US company

1988: Ben Johnson, serving a five-year ban for steroid abuse after breaking the world 100m record in the Seoul Olympics, admits using HGH

1989: the American sprinter Darrell Robinson claims that Florence Griffith-Joyner, the world’s fastest woman, paid him to buy her HGH shortly before she broke the women’s world 100m record

1990: a report by the New England Journal of Medicine states that HGH, taken for a year, stimulates an 8.8 per cent increase in muscle for men and a 14.4 per cent loss of fat without any dietary change

1990s to present: the use of HGH spirals in professional sport. Stars including swimmers, athletes and cyclists face inquiries for possessing HGH. The drug remains extremely difficult to detect once in the body HGH is extracted from the pituitary glands of corpses to treat dwarfism in children"