BBC Sport is running articles on the long-term effects of steroids, based on research done last year by Kristian Gundersen, Professor of Physiology at the University of Oslo, which demonstrated long term "muscle memory" effects in mice.
These articles have been triggered by the case of US sprinter Justin Gatlin. Gatlin had been banned from the sport for doping twice, most recently serving a four year ban, but returned to competition in 2010, and is now running faster than ever. He holds six of the seven fastest 100m times in the world this year, and has been nominated for the IAAF athlete of the year award. The BBC quotes Dai Greene (Britain's 2011 400m hurdles world champion):
Those are incredible performances. Not many people have run that fast separately, ever. To do it on a damp Friday night? I couldn't believe those times."
"It shows one of two things: either he's still taking performance-enhancing drugs to get the best out of him at his advanced age, or the ones he did take are still doing a fantastic job. Because there is no way he can still be running that well at this late point in his career."
[More after the break]
In the study, mice were exposed to anabolic steroids for two weeks, which resulted in increased muscle mass and number of nuclei in the muscle fibers.
The drug was then withdrawn for 3 months, a period which corresponds to approximately 15 percent of a mouse's lifespan. After the withdrawal, the mice’s muscle mass grew by 30 percent in 6 days following load exercise, while untreated mice showed insignificant muscle growth during the same period.
Although they experimented on mice, Gundersen states that the cell nuclei in humans are known to be very stable, and believes that the mechanisms are comparable, leading to the suggestion that the advantages could be lifelong or persist for decades.
However Gatlin's agent disagrees, saying that the current performances are due to four years of rest during the period of the ban, and athletic talent, blaming former coach Trevor Graham for being "over-zealous" and attempting to get results sooner, but that Gatlin would have otherwise been able to get to this level naturally.
In addition to the linked BBC article there's also an 80 Minute podcast from BBC Radio 5(mp3 link) with discussion and interviews on this topic.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by RamiK on Thursday October 09 2014, @10:10AM
So, the conclusion is anabolic steroids should be de-regularised and recommended for usage in a variety of conditions for sports and unrelated injuries since it's clear their long term benefits are considerable. Bad back? Old joints? Bum knee? Steriods will add muscle mass and make that muscle easy to maintain for those of a sedentary life style thus preventing further muscle and cartridge wasting and improving quality of life dramatically.
Well, that's one interpretation :D
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @12:09PM
But in the case of men, what do these steroids do to the testes? I've heard that these sort of substances will cause a man's testes and scrotum to shrivel severely. Maybe it's an exaggeration, but I've heard that a man's testes can become as small as raisins in extreme cases! If you've ever played with a normal testicle, you'd know that a raisin is a lot smaller.
(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Thursday October 09 2014, @12:57PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @07:34PM
Some guys think they never have enough of an edge. [google.com]
Is it worth it to have memory failure, serious ambulatory problems, and die at age 43 like Lyle Alzado? [wikipedia.org]
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday October 10 2014, @01:09AM
My apologies, gewg_, but your reply is better suited to the GP post [soylentnews.org]: I wasn't endorsing steroids, just pointing that the size of one's testes may be the least of worries.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 10 2014, @03:37AM
You're a few years off with that one. Now they have this little blue pill, makes men, uh, renew their concerns with youthful enthusiasm.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday October 10 2014, @04:19AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @01:18PM
Shrinking testicles aren't so much caused by steroids as they are a symptom of steroid dependency. Like everything in nature, your body operates on the "use it or lost it" principle. Steroids are essentially testosterone, so when you inject a bunch of it your body decides it doesn't need to maintain your balls because they aren't necessary to maintain testosterone levels anymore.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @12:10PM
> Steriods will add muscle mass and make that muscle easy to maintain for those of a sedentary life style
I think it is self-evident that the runner has not been living a sedentary lifestyle.
The gist of the mice research is that the muscle cells are there, but are dormant and require use to re-enable. Which sounds an awful lot like fat cells - once you get fat, even if you lose weight, the fat cells remain in a 'shrunken' state and will reactivate any time there is excess calories.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday October 09 2014, @12:51PM
Another interpretation is that he was the greatest athlete of all times but steroids worked adversely for some kind of allergic reaction which sapped the athlete's strength.
Seriously, sport is like gaming, if you cheat you may fool everybody win and be respected, but that's ultimately worthless because you cheated. IRL you also get money, because some morons pay for it. Well, you are still worthless and you just take a cut on a tax on morons.
(in fact sponsorship is a different beast because they will sink money no matter what consumers asked for, but for the sake of this discussion let's leave at it)
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @01:14PM
> IRL you also get money, because some morons pay for it. Well, you are still worthless and you just take a cut on a tax on morons.
Your definition of worthless seems highly specific. What is the point of competing "honestly?" When you are dead you are still just as dead. But the guy who cheated and got rich had a much more comfortable life than the guy who didn't.
Since sporting events don't change the course of history there is no greater good argument to be made for not cheating. It isn't like coming up with bogus medicines, or bad engineering that causes bridges to collapse.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday October 09 2014, @05:55PM
I will be brief but existence is a matter of belonging to an abstraction, that you call reality. The meaning of what you do belo,n,gs to a different abstraction, called meaning, and i value that, regardless of religious belief or other mere hypotheses, because our self deals with that one abstraction, where no arrow of time is defined. Meaning is eternal, and thats not a pompous statement , it is banal.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 10 2014, @12:10AM
So it is really all about your personal reality. Your meaning is derived from what you value, but that's hardly universal. And to judge others who harm no one by your reality rather than their reality is pompous.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Friday October 10 2014, @07:31AM
Not pompous, billion others judge and none is picked out. The meaning of cheating is universal because it is an arbitrary definition like all others.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 1) by dime on Friday October 10 2014, @04:28AM
>Your definition of worthless seems highly specific. What is the point of competing "honestly?" When you are dead you are still just as dead. But the guy who cheated and got rich had a much more comfortable life than the guy who didn't.
Your definition of comfortable seems highly specific. I wouldn't be comfortable in my own skin knowing that I never earned what I had.
(Score: 2) by tonyPick on Friday October 10 2014, @05:59AM
I wouldn't be comfortable in my own skin knowing that I never earned what I had.
Depends how you define "earned".
One takeaway from having followed pro cycling for a bit is that the guys doping are still working hard, and in some cases are taking PED's in order to be able to work *harder* than the people who aren't. Combine that with the "everyone's doing it" attitude and you have people who definitely feel they earned what they have, and can claim to have started doping to prevent being cheated out of it by those who were already doping.
There's an old-but-good related podcast here: on PEDs in cycling [bbc.co.uk]. Some of the interviews, particularly those with Tyler Hamilton, are an eye opener.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @07:47PM
if you cheat you may fool everybody [and] win and be respected, but that's ultimately worthless because you cheated
How hollow an experience that is [google.com] is revealed in a great Twilight Zone episode.
A Nice Place to Visit [wikipedia.org]
Rod Serling was a national treasure.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by tonyPick on Friday October 10 2014, @06:12AM
My interpretation is that it's the death knell for anti-doping in sport: The wars against the dopers are over, and the dopers won. The bulk of the testing regime is built around the idea that the effects of doping are short lived, and that to benefit the athletes have to take them regularly, and can be caught if the testers get lucky and spot a trace of the drug, or a spike associated with ingestion (and they have a hard time doing that). As soon as the effects are long term stable then that whole theory goes down the toilet.
So, the example raised in the podcast is; how do you catch the guy who retires early then waits (at most) a year out of the sport until he drops off the WADA checks, then goes and spends a solid year on steroids building up muscle, and then a third year training clean after which he goes back to competition?
The short answer is you don't - after a year clean you're well outside the detection window for most steroids, and you'll also be out of any performance spikes that the biological passport is designed to pick up, so if you have the benefits from your year on steroids for the rest of your athletics career then there's almost no downside, and a three or four year training cycle targeting a top level event is pretty standard...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @11:12AM
Fix the title please
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @05:36PM
Why? [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by davester666 on Thursday October 09 2014, @06:03PM
...that's the other thing that happens when you take steroids...
(Score: 2) by hubie on Thursday October 09 2014, @08:20PM
I don't get it. Why should it be Gatlina?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @09:51PM
It shouldn't. The 'a' shouldn't be there. That's what the GP was trying to say.
(Score: 2) by hubie on Thursday October 09 2014, @10:05PM
Then why did they change the article title??
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 10 2014, @12:54AM
They didn't. It always has had the "a". It should have been removed, but it hasn't been.
(Score: 2) by hubie on Friday October 10 2014, @01:39AM
Thanks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 09 2014, @05:44PM
(I swear, if I never hear his Tommie Copper commercial again it will be too soon.) Tommie Copper, by the way, is a company that sells copper-infused compression clothing that uses your body's natural energies to heal and recover you. I can't believe you cynics think it could be PEDs.
(Score: 1) by Darth Turbogeek on Thursday October 09 2014, @08:59PM
Sorry, but shit like micro dosing and drugs that have not been "found" by the anti-doping agencies are endemic in professional sports. The only pro sport that has gotten halfway clean is cycling and there is no denying that it's still got riders filled to the gills with PED's. This is the sad truth of professional sportds - you want to win? You listen to your doctor and you take what he tells you to. You ignore the damage said PED's will do to you (The fastest way to know a player is on PED's? Heart attack), you ignore that you are going to be a sad fucked up mess and you ignore you will probably still not make no 1. You take the drugs because your body wants to quit and that magic needle allows you get up in the morning and run / weight train again
Hell, PED's are endemic in amateur sports especially where testing isnt done.
And testing? HA! Remeber, many big name stars that have been busted never pissed hot. Even blood passports can be beaten, altho yes you have to microdose, more effective dosing that escapes piss in a bottle is still caught when the blood values are wrong.
That said, PED's are not harmless so dont take drugs, mmmm k'? Heart attacks, permanent loss of the natural ability to produce hormones like testosterone, injuries that you were able to train through become chronic, look at all the East German athletes who became wheelcahir bound cripples. Or how they cant produce red blood cells propely any more, or are forced into exercise every couple of hours so their blood doesnt thicken beyond what the heart can pump.
But for the millions on offer..... the risks and real damage might seem worth it and for pro athletes.... it's what they do.