Teen steroid use

Most parents are happy to encourage a teenager's involvement in sports. They see the sports environment as a healthy one, safe from the other pitfalls of the teen years. But even as early as age fourteen, teenage male athletes are more likely to try an anabolic steroid, a drug with serious health consequences. Anabolic steroids are a group of synthetic hormones similar to the male sex hormone, testosterone. Some teens believe that steroids will help them develop improved muscles, physical appearance, and performance in sport more quickly than through exercise.

High school steroid users typically come from white middle-class families. Most are boys. Few teenage girls use steroids because girls usually want to lose pounds, not gain them. Pressure to use steroids is particularly intense for members of health and fitness clubs, those involved in weight training, and members of provincial sport teams.

The 1993 National School Survey on Drugs and Sport suggests that 83,000 Canadians between the ages of eleven and eighteen have tried anabolic steroids. This large-scale study for the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport found that more than half of the guys who take steroids do so to improve their abilities in sports. That means almost as many boys use steroids for other reasons -- for muscle definition and that "cut" body look. Steroids are being taken by fourteen-year-old boys in a hurry to mature, by seventeen-year-olds who hate being skinny, as well as by eighteen-year-olds desperate for a university sports scholarship.

Know the risks
For the growing boy, steroids pose the risk of stunting growth by accelerating puberty and prematurely closing the growth centres of long bones. Steroids increase acne and the growth of body hair. All users risk high blood pressure and liver and kidney damage. And although steroids may temporarily increase one's interest in sex, they shrink the testicles, cause sterility and impotence, and enlarge the breast tissue in males.

It's still controversial whether anabolic steroids are physically addictive, but dependence and depression from withdrawal have often been reported. They are a hard habit to break, nevertheless, users get hooked on the look that steroids give because when they discontinue steroids, they lose body mass and feel fat and weak.

Steroids can be taken orally or by injection. One of the risks of taking anabolic steroids is the risk of contracting HIV, the virus that leads to AIDS, or Hepatitis B by sharing needles or even the same vial of steroids.