Dr. Mark Gordon on health: what the evidence says · JRE #1056

What the evidence says 01 / RECORD

Gordon appears to be citing a real 2004 clinical trial (Mahajan et al., European Journal of Endocrinology), but reverses its population and overstates its scope. That study enrolled 25 adults with growth hormone deficiency (GHD) already confirmed to be caused by identified pituitary or hypothalamic disease; it did not start with a pool of depressed patients and screen them for GHD. Among the 18 participants with adult-onset GHD, 11 (61%) were found to have atypical depression at baseline, and their depression scores improved after growth hormone replacement in this small, double-blind, placebo-controlled crossover trial. Gordon's framing implies the reverse: that screening people with treatment-resistant depression would reveal 61% have undiagnosed GHD, a claim the study does not support. Current clinical guidance restricts GH-deficiency testing to patients with a documented history of pituitary/hypothalamic disease, cranial irradiation, or brain injury, and explicitly discourages testing patients with a low pretest probability, such as depression occurring without any such history. The cited finding rests on a single, small (n=25), two-decade-old trial in a pre-selected pituitary-disease population and has not been established as a basis for evaluating or treating depression in the general population.