Posted by Larry Hoover on March 10, 2009, at 8:39:25
In reply to Re: Can Reseprine Effect Human Growth?, posted by nriver on March 10, 2009, at 7:38:46
> > I read an abstract of an article called "Effect of reserpine on growth and sexual development of chickens", and it mentioned how chickens that were given reserpine grew at a slower rate and how the testes of adult roosters could even atrophy.
>
> Like if a child takes it, could it stunt growth?No scientist worth his salt would ever argue that something had no risk. The fact that one can conceive of a plausible circumstance for a risk to exist makes it a non-zero risk, because we cannot prove none exists. You cannot scientifically prove a negative. So, the only scientific answer to your answer is yes (used to great effect in court room scenes on cop shows), but the risk is likely to be so small as to be effectively zero in this case.
The chicken study you mentioned was done in 1961, the doses were far in excess of those humans are exposed to, and involved animals which aren't even mammals.....so it's pretty hard to take this report as anything more than suggestive of a possible risk.
Later sexual development studies, in rodents, were done in Bulgaria, but they don't mention the dose. Rodents aren't primates, let alone people, and their brief lifespan and period of sexual maturation makes exposures during development very hard to interpret in comparisons with humans. Dose is critical in these kinds of risk analyses, and without that, who can say? I see no further work done on this, so I have to assume that nobody thought it important enough to do.
If there is a specific reason you're concerned, maybe I can look at that for you.
Lar
poster:Larry Hoover
thread:884600
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20090304/msgs/884719.html