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What are anabolic steroids?

Anabolic steroids are synthetic, or human-made, variations of the male sex hormone testosterone. The proper term for these compounds is anabolic-androgenic steroids. "Anabolic" refers to muscle building, and "androgenic" refers to increased male sex characteristics. Some common names for anabolic steroids are Gear, Juice, Roids, and Stackers.

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Health care providers can prescribe steroids to treat hormonal issues, such as delayed puberty. Steroids can also treat diseases that cause muscle loss, such as cancer and AIDS. But some athletes and bodybuilders misuse these drugs in an attempt to boost performance or improve their physical appearance.

The majority of people who misuse steroids are male weightlifters in their 20s or 30s. Anabolic steroid misuse is much less common in women. It is difficult to measure steroid misuse in the United States because many national surveys do not measure it. However, use among teens is generally minimal. The 2016 NIDA-funded Monitoring the Future study has shown that past-year misuse of steroids has declined among 8th and 10th graders in recent years, while holding steady for 12th graders.

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How do people misuse anabolic steroids?

    People who misuse anabolic steroids usually take them orally, inject them into muscles, or apply them to the skin as a gel or cream. These doses may be 10 to 100 times higher than doses prescribed to treat medical conditions.

Commons patterns for misusing steroids include:

• cycling—taking multiple doses for a period of time, stopping for a time, and then restarting

• stacking—combining two or more different steroids and mixing oral and/or injectable types

• pyramiding—slowly increasing the dose or frequency of steroid misuse, reaching a peak amount, and then gradually tapering off to zero

• plateauing—alternating, overlapping, or substituting with another steroid to avoid developing a tolerance

There is no scientific evidence that any of these practices reduce the harmful medical consequences of these drugs.

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How do anabolic steroids affect the brain?

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Anabolic steroids work differently from other drugs of abuse; they do not have the same short-term effects on the brain. The most important difference is that steroids do not directly activate the reward system to cause a “high”; they also do not trigger rapid increases in the brain chemical dopamine, which reinforces most other types of drug taking behavior.

Misuse of anabolic steroids might lead to negative mental effects, such as:

• paranoid (extreme, unreasonable) jealousy

• extreme irritability and aggression (“roid rage”)

• delusions—false beliefs or ideas

• impaired judgment

• mania

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