Using steroids to improve your athletic performance or to build muscle is dangerous. That’s why the supply or possession of testosterone and similar drugs without a prescription for a valid medical reason is illegal.
The most recent survey of Australian high school students about their use of alcohol and other substances found that 2.3% of students aged between 12 and 17 years had used steroids. You might want to use steroids because people around you are doing it, you want to improve your physical performance and you have body image concerns, but this can have serious short-term and long-term impacts on your health.
We have known for decades about serious health problems caused by high-dose steroid use, including:
There’s a possibility that steroid use during puberty can “stunt your growth” by interrupting normal bone development and maturation processes.
There are very few studies of the long-term effects of steroid use by this age group, but the limited evidence we have, what we know about biology, and results from animal experiments suggest permanent effects on brain development that result in greater impulsive behaviour and decreased attention. It’s reasonable to expect similar long-term effects on the reproductive and musculoskeletal systems.
There are new generations of synthetic drugs designed to mimic the muscle-building effects of testosterone without some of the unwanted side effects, like certain peptides and selective androgen receptor modulators (SARMs). These are unproven, unapproved, illegal and can introduce a whole new set of complications, like person-to-person transfer through sweat or sexual activity.
So if you’re considering using steroids, talk to someone who knows about health and who you can trust to give you an unbiased opinion, like a parent or other family member, your PE teacher, a coach at your local footy, cricket, basketball or some other sports club. Not someone at the gym where risk-taking and steroid use might be normalised. Definitely don’t trust the guy at the gym who can hook you up and is looking to make some money off you while pretending to be doing you a favour. The best person to go to for any health concern you have is your GP.
Tim Moss
Healthy Male Health Content Manager
Dr Tim Moss has PhD in physiology and more than 20 years’ experience as a biomedical research scientist. Tim stepped away from his successful academic career at the end of 2019, to apply his skills in turning complicated scientific and medical knowledge into information that all people can use to improve their health and wellbeing. Tim has written for crikey.com and Scientific American’s Observations blog, which is far more interesting than his authorship of over 150 academic publications. He has studied science communication at the Alan Alda Centre for Communicating Science in New York, and at the Department of Biological Engineering Communication Lab at MIT in Boston.
