What are some negative after effects of stopping the usage of steroids, HGH, and other “bolstering” substances?

Question

Dr. Anna Goldman, MD · Answer

So what are some of the negative effects of stopping using steroids, HGH and other bolstering substances? So what this question is getting at is what happens when typically a man, although there are cases of women as well, stop using anabolic androgenic steroids. Typically they've been using them because the patients are trying to bulk up and to gain muscle mass that's much greater than anything that could be achieved physiologically at the gym. The problem with anabolic steroids is that over time they're terrible for the heart, they're terrible for the liver, for the skin, they lead to gynecomastia, testicular atrophy, thus affecting fertility. So the problem is these super physiologic doses of steroids suppress the hypothalamic pituitary gonadal axis. So if men try and stop anabolic steroids cold turkey, they have what's called anabolic steroid induced hypogonadism where their own body has been hibernating and it's gonna take a while, if ever, for their own axis to wake up and to start producing testosterone again. And this can lead to significant fatigue, low libido, depression, and it's a vicious cycle where it makes it very difficult to stop these agents. So sometimes I have to put somebody on testosterone or a medicine called clomiphene which kind of helps their own hypothalamic pituitary axis to wake up again so that they would hopefully start to produce some of their own endogenous testosterone rather than me just replacing the testosterone that's missing. Thanks for the question.

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"What are some negative after effects of stopping the usage of steroids, HGH, and other “bolstering” substances?"