Friday, November 26, 2010

Anabolic Steroid Side Effects

1. Inhibition of Natural Hormones

The inhibition of natural hormones is probably the most common and probable side effect experienced from the use of anabolic steroids. In almost all cases, adding a hormone into your body will send a message to your endocrine system to stop producing it. This is because your body wants to remain in a very balanced state -- called "homeostasis," if I remember my high school biology class correctly. To maintain homeostasis, the body wants to avoid having too much of any particular hormone. To achieve this, the body sends a message to the testicles to slow down, or even stop producing testosterone when there is too much circulating. Unfortunately, this happens when any kind of hormone is added into the body, so even if an athlete is not using testosterone, but is using other anabolic steroids, the body will still send this signal 99% of the time. Of course different steroids cause varying degrees of inhibition ranging from total shut down of endogenous (natural) testosterone production, to very mild inhibition, where some natural hormones are still being produced and circulating. In almost all cases, this inhibition is over once the steroids aren´t active in the body anymore. In the following charts, we can see a mirror image of the level of steroid in the body (Nandrolone), compared with the level of natural testosterone being produced. In other words, as the level of steroid rises (chart 2), the level of testosterone falls (chart 1), and vice versa:



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