ABSTRACT
Athletes abuse steroids because they know that they improve performance. In healthy young people, steroid abuse increases lean body mass, strength, and aggressiveness, and shortens the recovery time between workouts (Plymate and Friedl, 1992; Foster and Housner, 2004). Rational scientific exploration into the mechanism of these effects, and possible medical complications, is limited because abusers routinely take doses of anabolic steroids well in excess of those that any physician could ethically administer.
