Effects of Performance-Enhancing Drugs
Over the past 25 years, there has been an explosion in youth sports participation, resulting in a dramatic increase in the total number of athletes under age 18 years. It is estimated that more than 30 million children and adolescents are participating in organized sports today. Title IX, which was passed in 1972, promoted equal numbers of male and female college athletes and increased the number of female athletes.
How Are Performance-Enhancing Drugs Detected?
Prohibited stimulants, like methylhexanamine, that are often found in contaminated pre-workout supplements, as well as permitted stimulants, like caffeine, can both result in negative health effects if abused. At low doses, stimulants can lead to increased perspiration, shaking, inability to focus, and sleep loss, as well as low appetite and dehydration. In higher doses, stimulants can also lead to more severe health effects, such as rapid heart rate and high blood pressure. In combination with exercise, stimulants can take a normal heart beating like this, to a heart that’s beating dangerously fast. Abuse of some stimulants has been shown to age the cardiovascular system more aggressively than smoking. And continued stress on the heart can eventually lead to cardiac arrhythmia, stroke, and heart attack.
Stimulant Abuse by Students
Moreover, using PES can also provide psychological benefits, such as increased confidence and self-esteem. For many athletes, bodybuilding is a way of life, and they are willing performance enhancing drugs to go to great lengths to achieve their goals [9]. Healthcare professionals are also well-positioned to identify individuals at risk for performance-enhancing substance use.
School Pressures are Factors in Abuse
Although this situation may sound counterintuitive or even absurd, consider the hypothetical example of a professional athlete who is anxious by nature but does not meet DSM criteria for an anxiety disorder. If this athlete is regularly competing on a public stage, he is likely to experience more anxiety than if working daily at a desk job. The more patients are symptomatic, the more aggressively physicians treat them. Are these athletes being given an unfair advantage if they can biologically increase their capacity to calmly compete in high-stress competition, even if the medication used is permitted? If so, who is ethically responsible to define this subtle issue and enforce fair policy? It seems that the burden falls less on the athlete, who is likely to be naïve to these implications, and more on the clinical experts who create policy with each sport’s governing body.
Human growth hormone (HGH)
Although the long-term effects of SARMs are still unknown, side effects may start with hair loss and acne. More serious health consequences have also been documented, including liver toxicity, as liver enzymes rise, and drops in good cholesterol, which can affect heart health. If this stress continues, SARMs have the potential to increase the risk of heart attack and stroke.
- The full side effects of HGH as a PED are still being studied, but research suggests they include insulin resistance, increased risk of certain cancers, and increased breast tissue in men.
- Most of the PEDs that athletes and nonathlete weightlifters used before the 1990s were pharmacologic agents approved for medicinal or veterinary use.
- The detection of synthetic anabolic steroids by gas chromatography/mass spectrometry began in the mid 1980s (361,–363).
What Are the Main Cognitive-Performance-Enhancing Drugs?
Depression has also been linked to steroid use, and athletes who use performance-enhancing steroids are more likely to attempt suicide than athletes who do not use them. Steroid users may become overly aggressive or combative, a condition commonly referred to as “’roid rage.” Uncontrolled aggression causes some steroid users to become confrontational with friends and family; sometimes, they end up in trouble with the law. Additionally, athletes who use a needle to inject steroids may have pain at the injection site and risk developing an infection.
- By the 1960s, anabolic steroids were widely used in bodybuilding circles, rapidly increasing muscle mass and strength gains [6].
- To develop a detection method for this drug, researchers had to understand the metabolism of stanozolol and how it could be detected most sensitively.
- In the 1980s and ’90s, however, other doping alternatives started appearing on the scene.
The effectiveness of current regulations in curbing the use of performance-enhancing substances in bodybuilding is a topic of debate among experts in the field. In many countries, performance-enhancing substances https://ecosoberhouse.com/ are classified as controlled substances, and their use and distribution are strictly regulated. However, some athletes still obtain these substances through the black market as undetectable or masking agents.
