Yesterday, Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig handed down a whopping 211-game suspension to slugger Alex Rodriguez, one of the most gifted—and as it turns out, tainted—players in the history of the sport.
In 2009, Rodriguez admitted to using performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) early in his career. Though Rodriguez has claimed he’s been clean since 2004, he reportedly took steroids over several years and attempted to cover it up when MLB began investigating Biogenesis, an anti-aging clinic in Florida, in January.
While 12 players (all first-time violators of MLB’s drug policy) agreed to serve 50-game suspensions without appeal for using illegal Biogenesis supplies, Rodriguez’s ties to the clinic’s founder, Anthony Bosch, got the Yankees star in bigger trouble. A-Rod is appealing his suspension—that’s why you saw him playing for the Yankees last night—but if he loses, he may stay sidelined for the entire 2014 season. The league has even threatened to ban him for life.
So how—and why—didA-Rod and the others get themselves into this mess in the first place? We asked Harrison Pope, M.D., a specialist in steroid abuse and author of The Adonis Complex, for the answer. Here are five things you need to know about PEDs.
1. How do steroids work?
“Testosterone is nature’s own anabolic steroid,” says Dr. Pope. Synthetic derivatives have similar molecular structures and create essentially the same effect as naturally occurring testosterone, but to a higher degree. Steroids simultaneously increase your muscles’ ability to grow while limiting the natural tendency to break down, and as a result, muscles can grow substantially bigger than their normal size—at a much faster rate.
2. What kind of edge can athletes like A-Rod get by taking them?
Anabolic steroids are particularly adept at increasing upper body strength, vital for doing superhuman (and lucrative) things like bashing home runs and pummeling linemen. In terms of muscular structure, men have larger pectorals, shoulders, biceps, and triceps than women, “so if you take testosterone, or any synthetic anabolic steroid, you’ll become effectively more male than male,” Dr. Pope says.
3. Do they work for the average Joe, too?
Sure. Steroids will have an effect for any male who takes them. But like creatine and other legal supplements, simply slipping the drugs into your bloodstream won’t make your arms bulge. “If you take them and simply sit on the couch, muscle gains will be quite modest,” Dr. Pope says.
4. Okay, so what are the side effects?
Because they act as synthetic testosterone, steroids signal your body to decrease its own production of natural testosterone. And when you stop taking them—people usually go through cycles of 6 to 12 weeks—your T levels could be super low, and might take a while to get back to normal. In rare cases, your testosterone may never recover. This can lead to shrunken testicles, man boobs, and balding. Some people also experience psychiatric side effects like exaggerated self-confidence irritability, aggressiveness, impaired judgment, and reckless behavior.
5. How about the long-term damage?
The answer is still up in the air, since steroids are a relatively new form of substance abuse, Dr. Pope says. According to his research, steroids appear to have some toxicity to the heart, and can potentially hasten atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries. But because most people in the U.S. who have taken steroids—estimated to be between 3 and 4 million—are still under the age of 50, researchers still can’t say how dangerous the drugs are. Studies suggest 30 percent of men who take anabolic steroids develop dependence to the drugs, even in the face of negative consequences.
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