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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
Most of these unsightly and antisocial side effects subside when users stop dosing. But other effects worry members of the medical community more. "[Using steroids] blows the hell out of your good cholesterol," says Yesalis. Over time, such a drop could lead to trouble. "If [low good cholesterol] is maintained for protracted periods of time, we know from studies of non-steroid users that it will increase your risk of heart disease and stroke," he explains.
Common sense suggests that heavy steroid use is likely to increase those risks. "As the evidence emerges," says Yesalis, "you can make a stronger argument that higher doses for longer periods of time can lead to significantly worse health effects -- that's not rocket science."
But the most alarming evidence of the life-threatening dangers of steroids remains anecdotal. Doctors and researchers have documented hundreds of horror stories. In their luridly titled book, "Death in the Locker Room II," Dr. Bob Goldman and Dr. Ronald Klatz recount tales of steroid users cut down in their prime: a 33-year-old body builder who had a stroke and underwent a triple bypass, a high school football star who dropped dead of a heart attack, another bodybuilder in his 30s who came down with a rare kidney tumor and died months later. The book warns that "anabolic steroids bestow few benefits, and none worth the terrible risks of taking them." But Klatz now concedes that estimating the long-term risks of steroids is "like saying Iraq had weapons of mass destruction -- a distinct possibility, but so far nothing's turned up."
"A lot remains in realm of conjecture," says Dr. Harrison Pope, a Harvard psychiatrist. There's been plenty of research on steroids' effects on lab animals, but no one has done the kind of controlled, longitudinal epidemiological study in people that would show how these drugs affect users 20 or 30 years later. A major problem, says Pope, is money. "It's too expensive to research. It would cost millions do that type of study." Pope should know: In his 2000 book "The Adonis Complex," he announced that he and his colleagues were starting a study of middle-aged subjects who used to juice up regularly. But the funding for the study, he says, has evaporated.
Another problem is finding willing subjects. Pumping human subjects full of steroids would be unethical, and actual users aren't lining up to volunteer in the name of science. "Very few people are doing studies of human steroid abusers at all because they are very hard to recruit," explains Pope. "It is a very secretive subculture, and it's hard to get people to come forward."
Perhaps the best-known steroid user to go public was Lyle Alzado. Shortly before his death from brain cancer at age 43 in 1992, the two-time All Star defensive lineman suggested that his illness might have been caused by years of doping. "I know there's no written, documented proof that steroids and human growth hormone caused this cancer," he wrote in Sports Illustrated. "But it's one of the reasons you have to look at. You have to." Former NFL drug advisor Dr. Forest Tennant predicted ominously at the time that "Alzado will be the first of a lot of big names to come down with cancers."
Football players didn't start dropping like flies, but unconfirmed reports of steroid-induced afflictions continue to follow former NFL players, WWF wrestlers and Olympic athletes. Concerns resurfaced with the sudden death of Olympic sprinter Florence Griffith Joyner in 1999. While she was alive, there was grumbling that Flo-Jo's accomplishments on the track were boosted by steroids, which in turn led to rumors about the true cause of her death.
Schwarzenegger's health has inspired its own fair share of gossip. In 1997, at age 49, he had two aortic valves replaced, a procedure that he maintained was an elective fix for a congenital problem. That didn't stop a Berlin heart specialist from predicting the imminent demise of "a well-known Austrian actor" due to steroid-induced heart problems. Schwarzenegger responded to the uninvited prognosis with a lawsuit, and was awarded $10,000 by a German court. In 2000, he launched a $50 million defamation suit against the Globe tabloid for alleging that he was a "ticking time bomb," eventually settling out of court and receiving a retraction. But the rumors weren't terminated so easily. A 2001 Premiere magazine exposé on the actor quoted an unnamed doctor who speculated that Schwarzenegger's heart condition was brought on by anabolic steroids. Team Schwarzenegger rushed to deny the claim, insisting it was "bogus."
