Performance enhancement -
They are made to work like a hormone that the body makes called testosterone. Some people use anabolic steroids for medical reasons. But doping for sports isn't one of the uses the drugs are approved for.
What makes some athletes want to use anabolic steroids? These drugs might lower the damage that happens to muscles during a hard workout. That could help athletes bounce back faster from a workout.
They might be able to exercise harder and more often. Some people also may like how their muscles look when they take these drugs. More-dangerous types of anabolic steroids are called designer steroids. Some drug tests may not be able to spot them in a person's body.
Anabolic steroids have no medical use that's approved by the government. Many athletes take anabolic steroids at doses that are too high.
These doses are much higher than those that health care providers use for medical reasons. Anabolic steroids have serious side effects too. Teens who take anabolic steroids might grow less than usual too. They also might raise their risk of health problems later in life.
Doping with anabolic steroids is banned by most sports leagues and groups. And it is not legal. It's never safe to buy anabolic steroids from a drug dealer.
The drugs could be tainted or labeled the wrong way. Androstenedione, also called andro, is a hormone everyone's body makes. The body turns andro into the hormone testosterone and a form of the hormone estrogen.
Andro can be made in a lab. Some drugmakers and workout magazines claim that andro products help athletes train harder and recover faster. But some studies show that andro doesn't boost testosterone. They also show that muscles don't get stronger. Andro is legal to use only if a health care provider prescribes it.
It's not legal to use as a doping drug in the United States. Andro can damage the heart and blood vessels in anyone who takes it. This raises the risk of a serious problem that can happen when the heart doesn't get enough blood, called a heart attack.
It also raises the risk of a condition that keeps the brain from getting enough oxygen, called a stroke. Heart attack and stroke can be deadly. Athletes take human growth hormone, also called somatotropin, to build more muscle and do better at their sports. But studies don't clearly prove that human growth hormone boosts strength or helps people exercise longer.
A health care provider can prescribe human growth hormone for some health reasons. It is given as a shot. Erythropoietin is a type of hormone. It treats anemia in people with severe kidney disease.
It raises the level of red blood cells. It also raises the levels of the protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen to the body's organs, called hemoglobin.
Taking erythropoietin improves how oxygen moves to the muscles. It's common for athletes who exercise for long amounts of time to use a lab-made type of erythropoietin called epoetin. In the s, it was common for pro cyclists to use erythropoietin. But the drug may have played a role in at least 18 deaths.
Doping with erythropoietin may raise the risk of serious health problems. These include stroke, heart attack and blocked arteries in the lung. Diuretics are drugs that change the body's balance of fluids and salts.
They can cause the body to lose water, which can lower an athlete's weight. Diuretics also may help athletes pass drug tests that check for signs of drugs in the urine.
They dilute the urine and may hide traces of drugs. Diuretics can cause side effects when you take them at any dose — even at doses that health care providers suggest. These drugs make athletes more likely to have side effects such as:.
Nutrients are vitamins and minerals in foods that are good for you. Some people try to get more nutrients from products called supplements. Supplements are sold in stores and online as powders or pills. One supplement that's popular with athletes is called creatine monohydrate.
The body makes its own creatine too. It helps muscles release energy. Creatine supplements may help athletes gain small, short-term bursts of power. Creatine seems to help muscles make more of an energy source called adenosine triphosphate ATP.
ATP stores and moves energy in the body's cells. It's used for activity that involves quick bursts of movement, such as weightlifting or sprinting. But there's no proof that creatine helps you do better at sports that make you breathe at a higher rate and raise your heart rate, called aerobic sports.
Some athletes try to gain weight so they can get bigger in size. Creatine may help you put on weight over time. But that might be due to the extra water that creatine causes the body to hold on to. Water is drawn into muscle tissue, away from other parts of the body.
That puts you at risk of getting dehydrated. Studies show that it's safe for healthy adults to use creatine for a short or long time. It's important to use the doses that creatine makers suggest on the package.
Stimulants boost the levels of some chemicals in the brain. They also make the heart beat faster and raise blood pressure. Common stimulants include caffeine and drugs called amphetamines. Cold medicines often have a stimulant in them. Energy drinks are popular among many athletes.
They often have high doses of caffeine and other stimulants. The street drugs cocaine and methamphetamine also are stimulants. Some athletes may seem to get an edge from performance-enhancing drugs.
But doping can have bad effects on health. In general, the long-term effects of performance-enhancing drugs haven't been studied enough. And any short-term perks come with risks.
Doping is banned by most sports leagues and groups too. There is a problem with information submitted for this request. Sign up for free and stay up to date on research advancements, health tips, current health topics, and expertise on managing health.
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And many sports heroes have been dethroned as a result. Athletes and others use performance-enhancing drugs PEDs to increase strength, endurance, recovery and other physical abilities beyond what is considered natural for the individual.
The intention behind using these drugs is to gain a competitive edge or enhance one's physical appearance. Anabolic steroids are among the most popular PEDs of choice. Chemicals in this special class of steroids, which include testosterone, androstenediol, androstenedione, nandrolone and stanozolol, are credited with increasing muscle mass and strength, but drug tests can easily detect anabolic steroid abuse.
In the s and '90s, however, other doping alternatives started appearing on the scene. Now there are numerous PEDs that aren't classified as steroids.
Their effects are quite varied, and some only benefit certain athletes playing certain sports. That makes it extremely tricky for regulatory agencies like the International Cycling Union and the World Anti-Doping Agency WADA to keep up — and to keep drugs out of competing athletes.
Today, WADA prohibits more than PEDs to some degree. New ones are constantly being developed, as are the methods used to detect them. Red blood cells carry oxygen throughout the body, so it makes sense that if an athlete can increase their red blood cell count, they'll deliver more oxygen to their muscles and perform at a higher level.
Blood doping — removing and preserving a supply of blood so it can be returned, via transfusion, to the body right before competition — is one way to do this.
But it's messy and time-consuming. Taking erythropoietin , or EPO, increases red blood cell production without the need for transfusions. The kidneys make the hormone naturally, although people with severe kidney disease don't produce enough.
That's what the biotechnology firm Amgen was looking to address when it introduced synthetic EPO in By the s, though, cyclists and other endurance athletes discovered that they could train longer and harder if they took the drug regularly.
Not surprisingly, taking EPO comes with significant risk. Studies have shown that it increases the risk of events such as stroke, heart attack and pulmonary edema. One theory suggests that the drug thickens the blood to the point where it produces fatal clots.
Such complications may have contributed to the deaths of at least 20 cyclists by , increasing the urgency to develop a reliable test to detect EPO [source: Zorpette ].
In , anti-doping agencies introduced the concept of a " biological passport ," a record of the substances found normally in an athlete's blood and urine, created by repeated sampling over time.
By comparing the results of a blood test administered right before a competition to the passport, officials can determine if an athlete has been using EPO or other performance-enhancing drugs. Like EPO, human growth hormone hGH occurs naturally in the body. In fact, the pituitary gland , the pea-sized organ located at the base of the brain, produces hGH to stimulate growth in children and adolescents and to increase muscle mass in adults.
As soon as synthetic hGH became available as a prescription medication in , when the U. Food and Drug Administration approved its use for a number of diseases that retard growth or cause muscle deterioration, athletes began eyeing it as a doping agent.
They figured it could mimic the muscle-building effects of anabolic steroids. At first, the high cost of the medication discouraged widespread use as a PED, but, as the saying goes, where there's a will to win, there's a way.
The Summer Olympic Games have been called the "hGH Games" because of the rampant use of the drug among competitors.
And it continues to be a problem among athletes. In summer , Nigerian sprinter Blessing Okagbare was kicked out of the Tokyo Olympics after testing positive for hGH.
Today, athletes get hGH from a variety of sources: doctors willing to write prescriptions for off-label use, online pharmacies, illicit websites for performance-enhancing drugs and clinics that use the hormone to reverse the effects of aging.
A few athletes even turn to black-market dealers that collect hGH from human cadavers. It's a risky gamble, especially considering the lack of scientific evidence to suggest that hGH actually increases athletic performance.
Oh, and don't forget the side effects. Using hGH has been linked to a variety of medical conditions, including joint pain, muscle weakness, fluid retention, carpal tunnel syndrome, cardiomyopathy and hyperlipidemia [source: Mayo Clinic ].
Another performance-enhancing drug that made the Summer Olympic Games memorable for the wrong reason was bromantane, a sort of stimulant and masking agent combined.
Several Russians tested positive for the drug, which at the time was not included on the International Olympic Committee's IOC's list of banned substances. That didn't stop the IOC from disqualifying several Russian athletes, stripping medals from two and ultimately blacklisting bromantane based on its performance-enhancing effects.
The effects of bromantane are quite unlike any other PED. Russian army doctors developed bromantane as a stimulant, something they could give to soldiers and cosmonauts to help them feel more alert and fight fatigue. Soon after, Russian athletes got hold of the drug, reporting that it helped them perform at peak levels without feeling exhausted.
Some anti-doping officials believe bromantane can hide the abuse of more serious drugs, such as steroids. Known as masking, this is just one more way athletes can find a way to cheat. For example, the masking agent probenecid stops the excretion of steroids for a few hours, decreasing the concentration of steroids in the urine.
The exact masking mechanism of bromantane, however, remains unclear. Bromantane gained popularity because it appealed on multiple fronts. But stimulants by themselves function reasonably well as performance-enhancing substances.
Athletes take stimulants to improve athletic performance, reduce fatigue and increase aggressiveness. And someone trying to qualify for a lower weight class may rely on stimulants for their ability to suppress appetite.
You may think first of amphetamines — prescription-only "speed" pills — when you hear of this class of drugs, but not all stimulants require a physician's signature.
Ephedrine, for example, is available behind the counter in drug products, mostly as decongestants. Dietary supplements containing ephedrine are illegal in the U. Athletes, of course, aren't interested in these. They want ephedrine for an extra boost of energy despite the warnings that the drug can cause high blood pressure, dizziness, shortness of breath and cardiac arrhythmia.
Along with bromantane, diuretics have long served to mask steroid use. Diuretics are any drugs that affect kidney function, resulting in increased urine output. The "water pill" chlorthalidone , for example, prevents kidney tubules from reabsorbing fluids and salts and returning them to the blood.
As a result, more water leaves the body. In patients with certain conditions, such as heart disease, diuretics can also help control high blood pressure.
But athletes who take anabolic steroids pop diuretics to dilute their urine, which decreases steroid concentration and makes it much more difficult to detect during drug testing. Of course, there is testing for diuretics, too.
Weightlifters and boxers may also down water pills to expel large amounts of fluid, which qualifies them to compete in a lower weight category. Then, right before the match, they stop taking the pills to return to their heavier fighting weight, giving them an advantage against their opponent.
However, an athlete taking diuretics may also get dizzy, become dehydrated or experience a severe drop in blood pressure — symptoms that make it hard to compete. Sometimes, a drug's effect on athletic performance depends on how it's administered.
For example, the well-known asthma drug albuterol works by relaxing the muscles lining the bronchial tubes, allowing more air to flow into the lungs.
Athletes with asthma believe it or not, elite athletes tend to have higher rates of asthma than people in the general population commonly use inhaled albuterol to treat their symptoms, allowing them to compete without shortness of breath [source: Kindermann ].
But what about athletes who don't have asthma? Could they suck in a few shots of albuterol and increase their lung capacity? According to research published in the journal Sports Medicine, this performance-enhancing effect simply doesn't exist. The authors found that, in 17 of 19 clinical trials involving non-asthmatic competitive athletes, the performance-enhancing effects of inhaled beta2-agonists could not be proved.
All bets are off, however, when an athlete takes albuterol orally or by injection. When administered in this fashion, albuterol has anabolic properties, which means it can help build muscle like steroids and, according to a study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, it can also boost sprint and strength performance.
Another orally ingested beta2-agonist known as clenbuterol aka clen packs an even bigger punch than albuterol. Athletes in several sports — cycling, swimming, baseball and soccer — have tested positive for clenbuterol use, although many have claimed that the drug could be traced to contaminated food.
While clenbuterol has historically been given to animals to produce leaner meat, the U. banned its use in meat in and the European Union followed suit in If the acronym sounds familiar, it probably is. GHB is known as a "date rape" drug because it can quickly render a user so relaxed and euphoric — especially when combined with alcohol — that they are easily taken advantage of.
Even scarier, it can cause amnesia, improving the chances that predators who slip the tasteless chemical into an unsuspecting imbiber's cocktail will get away with their misdeeds.
Because of the risks it posed, the Drug Enforcement Administration DEA banned GHB in but then brought it back to the market two years later after it was found to be useful in treating narcolepsy. Its use has since expanded to include another rare sleeping disorder, but GHB is only prescribed under strict safety controls.
Even before it gained infamy as a date rape drug, GHB was thought to improve exercise performance and muscle mass. There's even some scientific evidence that GHB increases growth hormone concentration. The drug apparently became popular among bodybuilders looking for alternatives to steroids in the s when the hormones were first being controlled.
Mike Fox , who was a personal trainer and good friend to retired New York Mets' player Mike Piazza, shot himself while trying to give up GHB in Bodybuilder Mike Scarcella, who was Mr. America and Mr. USA, died in August during a GHB withdrawal while hospitalized after a bar fight in Texas.
But the alleged performance-enhancing benefits of GHB live on. In , "Full House" actor John Stamos was arrested for driving erratically through Beverly Hills under the influence of GHB. Stamos claimed he was taking the drug to "lean out" body mass before his new TV show, "Grandfathered.
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