Boosters to build 6-pack abs may cost you kidneys

Many competitive bodybuilders take anabolic steroids to achieve their freakishly exaggerated physiques. That is no secret. But steroids can be only one part of an extreme regimen that can wreak havoc on the body.

Human growth hormone, supplements, painkillers and diuretics can also be used to create the “shrink-wrapped” muscles so prized in the aesthetic. And the high concentration of muscle mass puts stress on the body, as if the lifter were obese.

Lifting weights in the gym is “extremely healthy for you”, said Kenneth Wheeler, a former elite bodybuilder known as Flex. “But if you want to be a bodybuilder and compete at the highest level, it has nothing to do with health.” A relatively rare form of kidney disease forced Wheeler to retire in 2003 at age 37, and he needed a kidney transplant later that year.

Determining the extent of the damage that bodybuilders inflict on themselves is difficult, in part because there is little interest in financing studies on such a group, and because bodybuilders are not always honest about what they take. That is why a case study published last month by a top kidney journal is generating interest in the nephrology and bodybuilding communities. It is among the first to assert a direct link between long-term steroid use and kidney disease.

The study began 10 years ago when a kidney pathologist at Columbia University Medical Center in New York noticed that a bodybuilder had an advanced form of kidney disease. Curious, she started looking for similar cases and eventually studied 10 men with serious kidney damage who acknowledged using steroids. Nine were bodybuilders and one was a competitive powerlifter with a similar training routine.

A myth is busted: Testosterone not tied to aggression

A new study challenges the common belief that testosterone causes aggression in humans and proposes instead that the hormone encourages status-seeking behaviour, the journal Nature reported.

The study involving 120 women, also showed that folk wisdom about the effects of the sexual hormone is so strong that people behave more aggressively if they believe they have been given a dose even if they have not, the journal said.

Testosterone is a steroid hormone secreted by the male testes and to a lesser extent by the female ovaries that affects brain development and sexual behaviour. Research has found that it leads to a substantial increase in aggressive behaviour in rodents.

“Folk wisdom generalises and adapts these findings to humans, suggesting that testosterone induces antisocial, egoistic, or even aggressive human behaviours,” says the study published on Tuesday.

This wisdom has even reached the courtrooms because steroid-induced rage has been used as legitimate legal defence in the United States, it says. But research by the universities of Zurich and London shows that the steroid does not have the same effect in humans as it does in animals, it says.

The women, some of whom were administered testosterone and some a placebo, took part in an experiment in which they had to bargain to receive money. Common opinion would have held that subjects who received testosterone would have adopted aggressive, egocentric and risky strategies, regardless of the consequences, experts said.

“The study’s results, however, contradict this view sharply,” the statement says. “Test subjects with an artificially enhanced testosterone level generally made better, fairer offers than those who received placebos, thus reducing the risk of a rejection of their offer to a minimum.”

This suggested that subjects who received testosterone placed a higher value on social status than those who had taken the placebo, with the hormone increasing the sensitivity for status, it says. “The preconception that testosterone only causes aggressive or egoistic behavior in humans is thus clearly refuted,” adds neuroscientist Christoph Eisenegger from the University of Zurich.

For animals with simple social systems, an increased awareness for status may express itself in aggressiveness, the researchers add.