Performance Enhancing Drugs Essay

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Performance Enhancing Drugs
Performance enhancing drug abuse is a growing problem in adolescents and athletes. According to the Partnership for Drug – Free Kids, more than five percent of teens use performance enhancing drugs, or steroids to increase muscle. Performance enhancing drug abuse creates addiction, the mental tension and pressure that coaches and peers bring to inferior athletes this draws teens and athletes to engage in these products, further encouraging teens to partake in the use of performance enhancing drugs, with long-term and short-term use leading to insufferable effects, like kidney failure, depression and stunted growth. What are performance enhancing drugs? Numerous people use the words steroids or performance enhancing
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However, though, anabolic steroids make you bigger and stronger; they also drastically decrease the recovery time in between workouts. This allows athletes to workout longer and less periodically than others. While taking steroids, as long as teens see results, they will want to continue to take the steroid; results like muscle gain will encourage the individual teen or athlete to keep taking steroids. Steroids are regularly taken sporadically rather than nonstop, both to prevent undesirable side effects and to provide the body’s hormonal system a sporadic chance to recover. Incessant practice of steroids can drop the body’s sensitivity to the drugs as well as making the body to discontinue reproducing its own testosterone; pauses in steroid use are thought to amend these issues. “Cycling” consequently refers to “a pattern of use in which steroids are taken for periods of weeks or months, after which use is stopped for a period of time and then restarted.” (National Institute on Drug Abuse) Furthermore, users often collaborate numerous different types of steroids and include other steroidal or non-steroidal supplements users put effort into making the most of their effectiveness, an exercise referred to as “stacking” (National Institute on Drug Abuse). After a good period of time, their bodies will be used to the drug intake, and if intake stops the body will go into withdrawal, this indicates that …show more content…
Well even though anabolic steroids do not give you the same high as other drugs such as marijuana and cocaine, the physical effects of the drug can still be addictive. The addiction process is also a bit different than the other addicting drugs as well. As said before anabolic steroids have certain chemicals that once put into the body for amounts of time the body cannot be without. With that being said the chemicals that performance enhancing drugs/anabolic steroids effect are the dopamine levels in the brain, and the serotonin and opioid systems. When the dopamine levels are affected this can cause mood swings for being sad to happy at different points. When the serotonin and opioid systems are affected depression and “roid rage” or fits of rage take place. (National Drug

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