How long do the side effects of steroids last?
All of those side effects are reversible within four weeks of cessation, though women tend to stay masculinized after using steroids. And every athlete who has considered juicing (taking steroids) knows that. Athletes generally go on a steroid-taking cycle for six to eight weeks, and then they come off for about two months before going back on. And when they’re off, side effects revert back to normal.
The athletes who run into major health issues are body builders or wrestlers who get paid based on their external appearance. They can develop what’s known as muscle dysmorphia, which is basically reverse anorexia. Like a person who considers himself or herself fat all the time, body builders and wrestlers look in the mirror and see themselves as being small. Those are the athletes who never come off the cycle.
Are there other health risks from taking steroids?
Steroids could be lethal to someone with an underlying mental or cardiovascular disease. Anabolic steroids are like any other medication. If you have hypertension and your doctor prescribes you a certain medication, such as an ACE inhibitor, there may be contraindications for using that particular medication if you have, say, kidney disease. If an athlete is suffering from a mental illness like depression or bipolar disorder – which many steroid-taking high school athletes who commit suicide allegedly suffer from – anabolic steroids are the wrong performance-enhancing drug to use. But when given in a clinical setting, steroids are relatively safe.
How are steroids used in a clinical setting?
By themselves, steroids are a very effective clinical tool for treating muscle-wasting diseases such as cancer, AIDS, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disorders. Sports scientists around the world study changes in athletes’ testosterone and cortisol levels. Cortisol is a catabolic steroid produced by the adrenal glands above the kidneys and it breaks down lean tissue in the absence of carbohydrates needed for energy. It’s also released in times of stress. Through high-intensity training over the course of a baseball season, testosterone levels go down and cortisol levels go up. The athlete becomes testosterone-depleted, or hypogonadal, and fatigue sets in. That phenomenon is known as “overtraining syndrome.”
One way to treat this is to restore testosterone levels using an exogenous (external) source. We do that with men over 50 who have a normal decline in testosterone, though not with the super-pharmacological doses that many athletes use. There’s a lot of talk amongst team physicians about whether it should be permissible to use exogenous testosterone to bring an athlete back up to normal levels. But the issue is not being approached right now, because of the witch hunt that’s going on. There’s such a kneejerk reaction in the sports media about steroids and these things get sensationalized. There’s such a lack of understanding about what steroids do. I think we need to look at this more scientifically.
Rodriguez has won two MVPs since he stopped juicing. Can athletes keep the gains in muscle mass without continuing steroids?
The muscles begin to come down, though there’s still a significantly greater difference in size and strength even eight weeks after you’ve taken the drugs. Again, it all depends on how much you’ve taken and how hard you train. But can you keep gains three years later? No.
So the big question people may be asking is if Alex is taking something else. His homerun numbers have declined, but they’re still pretty damn good. The benefit of the doubt for him, however, has now gone out the window. For example, maybe his [lucrative] contract could allow him to buy a designer steroid that’s undetectable. What the people who are involved in [professional sports drug] testing realize is that most athletes in that community are a few years ahead of the drug testing laboratories. Now is Alex on the cutting edge? It’s possible.
What was your own experience with taking steroids?
I started using anabolic steroids my senior year of college in 1982 at St. Johns (in Queens, N.Y.) which is a small school for football – not like their acclaimed basketball program. I wanted the opportunity to play professional football, and I thought I needed to do something to compete with the athletes coming out of Division I (the top collegiate athletic tier). For me, it was important to be as big as possible. It was my dream. And I was very fortunate to be the first athlete from St. Johns to sign a professional contract with a National Football League (NFL) team, the New York Jets. I did not make it past training camp though, and then I was traded to the New Jersey Generals, then the Tampa Bay Bandits (both part of the now-defunct United States Football League). Then in 1984 I signed on with the Philadelphia Eagles.
I used steroids for those three years, from 1982 to 1984. At the time, steroids were not illegal. I had a prescription for them and bought them at a pharmacy, just like any other medication. Most of the guys in the training camps would use, and so we’d discuss whose room we would inject in that night. At that time in the NFL, it was one of those things you had to do to play in the League, I felt.
Team physicians were not involved, as far as I know, but they monitored our health. I had constant exams to make sure my liver enzymes were functioning properly and my heart was doing well, and that all the blood lipids were fine. I did it in what you could say was the right way. I wasn’t abusing steroids or going to two different physicians to get two different prescriptions to double up on dosages. I was doing it professionally.
Did you experience any side effects?
I had the side effects that you would normally see – the acne, the hypertension – but nothing that was too terrible that I couldn’t deal with. My last season, I took a powerful androgen and it was the first time that I really saw significant changes in my personality. And I felt at that point in my third training camp that those types of changes were not worth it to me, and I stopped using. But the experience did spark a lifelong interest in why steroids are effective and also to take a look at alternatives.
What do you think about alternative strength-promoting supplements?
When I played, they didn’t have the type of supplements that exist today, like creatine (an organic acid that helps supply muscles with energy) and beta-alanine (an amino acid that helps regulate pH in muscles) and some kinds of protein. If they did, I’m sure I would have used those instead of anabolic steroids. But I don’t regret at all what I did, because I did it with care. I knew exactly what I was putting into my body. I knew exactly why I was doing it and I knew the price I was willing to pay for that. I would do it again. There are no long-term effects – I have three healthy, beautiful children. I didn’t grow a third leg or become impotent or any of that BS you see on TV. But there are those athletes who have problems, because they never stop using and they have underlying health issues like mental illness or heart problems. That’s why education becomes so important.
What do you think about the debate over performance-enhancement drugs in sports?
We have to keep in mind that these professional athletes are individuals who are at their physiological edge, or limit. These people understand their bodies so well. They know they need something more. So that’s the importance of trying to get them to understand what they can and cannot do. Unfortunately, for many years, Major League Baseball ignored that and didn’t have the appropriate people in the locker room to help provide that sort of education. So the athlete is left alone, and as a result they go to the gym rat and get the wrong information.
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16 Comments
Add CommentHe's lying.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA-Rod wasn't "stupid about it", he did a smart thing that got him millions of income.
The problem is that the rules have changed. A few years back professional sports was very cavalier about doping, so doping was the economically right thing to do. On the other hand, lying about it in front of a jury or a senate commission, under oath, isn't exactly the right thing.
It's time we got clear rules. Either there is 100% surprise blood/urine sampling with samples frozen for X years (so that new drugs that aren't detected today can be found later) or doping is OK. You can't have anything in between. What I'd like to see are "pro" and "natural" divisions like in bodybuilding.
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Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI want to make a friendship with someone clever
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI want to tell you about the pwoer of our brain
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please, explan more about your idea
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHoffman did an interesting study on whether teenagers use steroids because their role models like A-Rod use them. Check out the results here: http://sportsanddrugs.procon.org/viewanswers.asp?questionID=1240
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOver time I'm seeing less overall improvement in a person taking steroids. By comparing nearly forty years of progression of track athletes, specificially the dash events, look at the lowering of times and look at the number of total athletes being tested positive. Then, check back with tested positive athletes and clean athletes and the times are still lowering. So maybe there are steroid athletes who are benefitting on the short term from the drug due to repetitive injury. But overall, the steroids aren't giving a benefit. There are so many testings now being done on the high performance athletes that getting caught is too easy. Recently, femaleUS tennis star was complaining about the total number of testings being done in a calender year. But records are still being broken by clean athletes, and lowering standards that were being won by "steroid" athletes such as a Ben Johnson. So did the steroids really benefit a Ben Johnson during his time, compared to the last summer Olympics won by the Jamiacan who was clean.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'd say that better training methods, combined with improved understanding of sports science is improving sports records in physical events like dash events.
Maybe its time we dropped this steroids war, and let those that do use the drug die from cancer and all the other associated problems associated with the long term use of the drug.
What an insipid article. A-Rod's numbers were marginally higher in 2001-2003. Of course, that must be steroids. Let's just ignore that those were his peak age years and he was hitting in a Texas bandbox. And how does he know the Mets weren't taking steroids? Have all the teams in history that have surged in September been on the juice? Is there any historical evidence that power hitters fade over the season (no)?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm not saying steroids don't make players perform better. But you have to look at the evidence as Baseball Between the Numbers did. This is just someone talking off his hip about something he knows little about, despite his admitted use. Scientific American should be ashamed for running it.
Do you know what you're talking about? Hal_10000 raises the point I was going to bring up in his "Let's just ignore..." sentence. You CAN'T ignore that. He moved to the best home run hitting park in the American League and played there for three PRIME years. Those were the years you would have expected him to have career highs in home runs, in a park that only added to his total. You have to know a little bit about baseball if you want to have credibility in the discussion. You whiffed on this one.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRalf123, he didn't get the millions by using steroids. If you're a baseball fan, you know the timeline. You are ignorant or dishonest.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo you say the fact that he was able to train harder and stay injury free early in his career didn't have anything to do with him becoming a superstar?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnd you assume that he's saying the truth about not taking anything while with the Yankees? What exactly does "clean" mean? Not taking anything that's currently illegal I guess - he didn't say anything about other performance enhancing drugs. Which he better didn't because every professional athlete takes them.
A point of contention: a person who artificially enhances performance with drugs is not 'maximizing their potential', they are exceeding their potential. I don't care about drugs, or morality, or role models or any of that b.s. Just don't try to pass this off as someone doing the best they can with what they have. It's artificial. It's fake. It's a lie. It makes great ad copy and fits into a rousing locker room speech, but there is no such thing as 110%.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe naivete--putting it charitably--expressed in this essay is astonishing. To pick just one grain of sand off the beach, while most effects of steroid use normally do reverse on discontinuation, gynecomastia often does not, and may even require corrective surgery of a nontrivial nature.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut that greater errors are in unvalidated (and falsifiable) presumptions about steroidal effects. The web site steroids-and-baseball.com documents at some length the scientific literature on the key points, from medical effects to adolescent use to actual baseball statistical analyses. But the belief in the "eveil empire" of steroidal "cheaters" in baseball has now become not a science but a religion, and thus data and reasoning have correspondingly become irrelevant.
Does anyone know the volume #, issue #, and pages of the article?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHelp Please?!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat is the volume #, issue #, and pages of the article?
There's been a research said that abusing anabolic steroids can carry numerous health risks. In a new study of bodybuilders who abused the substance, a link may have been found between that misuse and serious kidney problems.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this<b><a href="http://www.sheeparcade.com">Free Games</a></b>
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There's been a research said that abusing anabolic steroids can carry numerous health risks. In a new study of bodybuilders who abused the substance, a link may have been found between that misuse and serious kidney problems.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this<b><a href="http://www.sheeparcade.com">Free Games</a></b>
www.sheeparcade.com