Inhibition of Natural Hormones
The inhibition of natural hormones is probably the most common and probable side effect experienced from the use of anabolic steroids. In almost all cases, adding a hormone into your body will send a message to your endocrine system to stop producing it. This is because your body wants to remain in a very balanced state -- called "homeostasis," if I remember my high school biology class correctly. To maintain homeostasis, the body wants to avoid having too much of any particular hormone. To achieve this, the body sends a message to the testicles to slow down, or even stop producing testosterone when there is too much circulating. Unfortunately, this happens when any kind of hormone is added into the body, so even if an athlete is not using testosterone, but is using other anabolic steroids, the body will still send this signal 99% of the time. Of course different steroids cause varying degrees of inhibition ranging from total shut down of endogenous (natural) testosterone production, to very mild inhibition, where some natural hormones are still being produced and circulating. In almost all cases, this inhibition is over once the steroids aren´t active in the body anymore.
Most athletes who use anabolic steroids accept all of this as a necessary price to pay in order to experience the benefits from using steroids. In an effort to combat this, athletes have experimented throughout the years with various compounds to avoid or at least limit this problem. Human Chorionic Gonadotropin, anti-estrogens, and Selective Estrogen Receptor Antagonists are all used during a cycle, or after (or both) with this goal in mind.
What we see is not surprising to anyone who is actually familiar with steroids, and not with media-hype. In people studied who haven’t used steroids for a year, ALL of their measured hormones (testosterone, estrogen) were within the NORMAL RANGE! Clearly, the effects that steroids have on your hormones are reversible and the horror stories we’ve all read in the media about people who never regained normal hormonal function after one cycle are greatly exaggerated. I think anyone who is familiar with "After School Specials" about steroids will be very surprised at learning this fact. As for "The Aaron Henry Story" on HBO, I can’t imagine how he has suffered side effects well into his 40âs when the steroid users in this study were totally fine after one year, and in some cases used more than he did!
