| Steroids
- The Truth about Steroids
Picture: National Institute of Drug Abuse
Everything you need to know about anabolic steroids,
anabolic steroid information, types of steroids, sports steroids,
steroid use, steroid use in sports, steroid information, legal steroids,
steroid and steroids pictures.
Find out the truth about steroid cycles, the history
of steroids, steroid abuse, steroids in sports, steroid side effects,
injecting steroids, mexican steroids, steroid profiles, steroids
in baseball, why people buy illegal steroids.
Why steroids are so powerful and so dangerous
if abused
Steroids are natural substances with many different
effects in the human body, which begin over several days. The primary
use of steroids in health care is to reduce inflammation and other
disease symptoms. Steroid inhalers have an important role in reducing
deaths from asthma, local steroid injections are useful in treating
painful joints and ligaments. Steroid creams are used extensively
to treat eczema and other inflammatory skin conditions. Steroids
make the whole immune system less active, which can be very useful
in illnesses where there is an immune component - a huge number.
Steroids are the ultimate anti-inflammatory drugs.
However steroid use in medicine is limited by very
serious side effects in the body as a whole. That is why steroids
tend to be used sparingly in local preparations such as sprays and
creams, which ensure maximum steroid dose where it is needed, and
minimum levels in the blood stream.
Steroid use in medicine and health care
Steroid skin creams for example cause thinning and
weakness of the skin, while steroids also cause calcium to leak
out of bones so that they weaken and fracture spontaneously. Steroids
also make people feel very hungry and cause blood sugar to rise.
People on steroids can gain weight and often develop a typical "moon
face" as well as getting diabetes.
Another serious steroid problem is that we all need
aggressive immune systems to fight infections and cancers, but steroids
knock that out. People on high doses of steroids for medical reasons
can die from chest infections and cancers of many kinds. We see
these patterns in those who receive organ transplants, who need
often need huge doses of steroids to stop the body from destroying
the donated tissue. Cancers often develop, which shows us how important
our white cells are in keeping us cancer-free, and how often all
of us develop cancer in our daily lives. Most of us may have two
or three tiny cancers inside us at any time. Taking high dose steroids
makes it more likely one of these will develop rapidly.
People on high dose steroids are immune-deficient
in every way so that many organisms that rarely cause problems can
overgrow, totally upsetting the normal balance of mircobes in the
body. An example is candida yeast which can grow rapidly in the
mouth causing painful thrush.
Effects of steroids on brain and cancer
Steroids also affect the brain, and high doses can
make people feel happy, euphoric, hyped-up, with disturbance of
sleep and even serious psychiatric illness such as mania, very aggressive
behavior and psychosis (delusions, pananoia, loss of touch with
reality). If steroid users are also taking other drugs which affect
mood or brain function, these side-effects can be far more common.
Steroids are really useful in the care of those with
advanced cancer when short life expectancy from their condition
means physicians are far more relaxed about long term side-effects.
Brain tumours often respond dramatically to steroids.
The reason is that the brain is contained in a bony box inside the
skull and pressure can build up inside the head, resulting in headaches,
sickness, drowsiness and other problems. Brain scans often show
that a tunour the size of a wallnut can be surrounded by a big immune
reaction, with brain swelling and inflammation. Steroids reduce
the additional swelling, often reversing symptoms and buying time
- maybe a few weeks. The underlying cancer continues to grow and
if the person finally begins to deteriorate death often follows
rapidly as the steroid dose is reduced.
So steroids are really powerful, with wide ranges
of actions, producing dramatic effects ranging from pain relief
to mood elevation, and if it were not for the very serious side
effects they would be used even more often.
The body becomes dependent on steroids and when used
in health care, most physicians reduce dosage gradually, even though
they may start in an acute illness with a very high dose.
Why do people abuse steroids?
So why on earth would anyone who is perfectly healthy
want to take steroids? The reason is that one particular type, anabolic
steroids, have another side effect which is to stimulate muscle
growth. Sadly for the sports enthusiast, this effect only works
well if steroid level in the body as a whole is quite high, and
that guarantees problems with side effects.
Taking steroids won't increase muscle bulk without
exercise but the normal response to exercise is exaggerated.
Often you will find underlying psychological reasons
why people abuse steroids in muscle building. Some studies suggest
up to 25% have been physically or sexually abused as children or
attacked as adults and are highly motivated to make themselves powerful
and resistant to future attack. Others have a body image problem
similar to anorexia nervosa, so that they see a weak and feeble
body in the mirror - muscle dysmorphia. In some, steroid abuse is
just a part of a wider picture of risk-taking.
Anabolic and Androgenic steroids
Steroids can be divided into two types: anabolic and
androgenic, but the distinction in some ways is artificial. Anabolic
steroids mainly affect metabolism, immunity and muscle, while androgenic
steroids have strong masculinisation effects on women and sometimes
feminisation effects on men. But all anabolic steroids will increase
masculine characteristics such as thick facial hair if the dose
used is significant.
Steroid cycling is a regular pattern of steroid use
and non-use by athletes or body builders, the aim being to get maximum
action with minimum side-effects, often by using a wide variety
of different steroid preparations at the same time (stacking), and
perhaps to avoid detection by timing non-use to coincide with major
competitions where steroids testing may be imposed.
Some steroid abuses use pyramidding - starting with
low doses and building up over days or weeks to a peak dose and
then tailing off.
Anabolic steroid side effects
Typical problems you will find in people who abuse
anabolic steroids include liver tumors and cancer, jaundice (yellow
skin from liver failure), retention of fluid, high blood pressure,
heart attacks and strokes, increases in LDL (dangerous form of cholesterol),
kidney cancer, acne and trembling.
Men may find their testes shrink, sperm count falls with increase
of infertility, their hair falls out, breasts start to develop,
and prostate cancer becomes more likely. More than half of body-builder
sterod abusers will typically experience enlarged breasts and shrunken
male organs.
Women can start looking like men: growing beards, going bald, voice
breaking - while their menstrual cycle changes or stops, and the
clitoris enlarges.
Steroid abuse is particularly risky for teenagers, because it forces
the body rapidly to adulthood, bones stop growing - permanently
- and they reach puberty early.
Adolescents--growth halted prematurely through premature skeletal
maturation and accelerated puberty changes.
And of course, steroid injecting carries all the other risks associated
with other injecting drug use, such as infection with HIV, and hepatitis
B or hepatitis C.
How many people abuse steroids?
Some surveys suggest that 2.5% of high school pupils in the US
will have taken illegal steroids at some time. This is particularly
worrying considering the very high risks of steroid abuse in those
under the age of 18.
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