At this point, you’ve probably heard enough on why athletes use steroids or about the short- and long-term effects of anabolic steroids. So is there anything else you might still be missing?

Read on and find out.

Fact # 1: Anabolic steroid use affects fat distribution in the body
It’s common knowledge that bodybuilders often resort to anabolic steroids and other performance enhancing drugs to bulk up, but a Swedish study found that doing so could lead to dangerous fat distribution in the body. According to the researchers at Lulea University of Technology and Umea University, weight lifters who actively use anabolic steroids have more dangerous fat distribution in their body which raises their chances of suffering from strokes and heart attacks. The study involved ten elite lifters and the finding was published in the 2012 edition of The Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research.

Fact # 2: Anabolic steroid use may cause severe kidney injury
It’s true that anabolic steroids can help you gain muscle mass and strength, but this doesn’t come without damaging your kidney. A 2009 research published in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology revealed that habitual use of anabolic steroids has harmful effects on the kidney that were not previously recognized. But the good news is, there’s still a good chance that such kidney abnormalities can be improved by quitting steroids use.

Fact # 3: Steroid use are increasing among females and non-athletes
Gone are the days when steroids are only used by men and females who want to gain competitive advantage in sports. In fact, teen girls were found to be the fastest growing group of new steroids users. A 2003 national survey of more than 7,000 female high school students found that 5.3 percent of 9th to 12th graders had used steroids for non-medical reasons. Many of these girls were not even athletes. Experts said that girls who use steroids are also at greater risk of engaging in other problematic behaviors, such as attempting suicide, teenage pregnancy, and use of other illegal substances.

Fact # 4: Teens use steroids to look physically appealing
A lot of teens are heavily influenced by what they see from movie stars and the desire to achieve similar adoration from other people. Add to that is the presence of social media sites like Facebook and Instagram, wherein posting pictures have become a favorite pastime. Any teen would feel a heightened sense of confidence when their friends tell them they’re looking great. So to address their body image issues, some teens would go the easy route which is using steroids.

Fact # 5: It takes less than 5 seconds to find steroids for sale on the Internet
Obtaining steroids has become very easy with the Internet around. Teens just type in a few steroid-related keywords and they can access dozens of sites that sell steroids. An infographics on Taylor Hooton Foundation showed that it only takes 1 second for a student to locate steroids for sale online, with 40 percent of the high school seniors admitting it’s so easy to obtain the drug nowadays.

Barely 20, Bieber now sports wider chest, remarkable shoulders, toned biceps, and great abs. Somehow, observers can’t help but wonder if he’s into steroids use, especially considering the erratic and more aggressive behaviors he has been displaying lately.

According to Celebrity Health & Fitness, Bieber has been inspired by the gains Taylor Lautner made to bulk up for his role as werewolf Jacob Black in the “Twilight” movie saga. In fact, so inspired that he sought Lautner’s trainer to help him achieve similar gains.

Even though Beiber maintained religiously “working out in the gym” and despite the lack of admission that he was into steroids, his Instagram photos and recent display of aggressions have become media fancy.

It can be remembered that Beiber was kicked out of a nightclub on his 19th birthday; kept his fans in London waiting for nearly two hours before he appeared on stage; collapsed on stage at another London show; fought with photographers and cancelled a show in Portugal. Most recently, he allegedly screamed at and spit on his neighbor when he was confronted for reckless driving, the article notes.

Steroids use is nothing new in the entertainment industry, as much as it is widely used in professional sports. After all, music and movie celebrities are always expected to look good for their fans.

In addition to enhancing muscles, steroids are known to cause aggressive acts, mood disturbances, and poor decision-making. Other symptoms of steroid abuse include depression, muscle cramps, aching joints, and insomnia. It could also increase one’s risk to cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, and certain cancer.

Here are three of the most widely used performance-enhancing drugs and the risks they can bring to the user’s health.

Anabolic steroids
This is probably the most popular performance-enhancing drugs among athletes and teens. They are used to increase muscle mass and strength. Although they have approved medical uses, they are not recommended to boost athletic performance. Still, many athletes are using them as the easiest and fastest way of bulking up.

In men, the negative side effects of anabolic steroids include baldness, shrunken testicles, infertility, impotence, and prominent breasts. In women, the effects include developing deeper voice, enlarged clitoris, increased body hair, irregular periods, and baldness. Men and women who are into anabolic steroids are also at risk of severe acne, liver abnormalities and tumor, high blood pressure, drug dependence, depression, aggressive behaviors, and infectious diseases like HIV (usually acquired through drug injections).

Human Growth Hormone
This performance-enhancing drug is known to produce anabolic effect. Athletes use them to enhance muscle mass and performance. The drug can be obtained only by prescription and is administered by injection. Although it allows tired muscles to recover quicker, thereby allowing an athlete to train harder, it doesn’t guarantee better performance. Among the side effects of the drug include joint pain, muscle weakness, fluid retention, diabetes, high blood pressure, elevated cholesterol level, and impaired sugar regulation. In addition, it could enlarge liver and kidneys which may lead to more serious health problems.

Erythropoietin (EPO)
Although commonly used to treat anemia in people with severe kidney disease, this drug is widely used by endurance athletes because of its effect on red blood cell production which gives athletes noticeable endurance boost. The procedure for EPO use, however, carry greater health risk in the sense that it increases the user’s risk for stroke, heart attack and pulmonary edema. Athletes who are blood doping are also more likely to experience seizures and hypertension. EPO injection must carried out with extreme caution, as the blood can be difficult to store and administer.

But when researchers from the University of Minnesota looked into data of nearly 3,000 surveyed adolescents at 20 urban middle and high schools, they found that females were not far behind from their male counterparts in terms of steroids use and muscle-enhancing behavior

According to the findings of “Muscle-Enhancing Behaviors Among Adolescent Girls and Boys,” 62 percent of girls reported changed eating habits to increase muscle size or tone. About 21 percent reported using protein powders or shakes, 4.6 percent admitted using steroids, and 5.5 percent reported using other muscle-enhancing substances. These figures are higher than what has been reported in previous research.

Among boys, more than two-thirds reported changing their eating habits to increase enhance muscle size or improve muscle tone, 34.7 percent reported using protein powders or shakes, 5.9 percent reporting using steroids, and 10.5 percent using some other muscle-enhancing substance.

Almost 12 percent of boys and 6.2 percent of girls reported using 3 or more of the behaviors examined for the study.

“We were not expecting to see rates as high as we did among girls, since this is typically thought of as a boy’s issue,” lead author Marla E. Eisenberg, Sc.D., M.P.H. Division of Adolescent Health and Medicine, Department of Pediatrics, said in a news release. “Our findings show society needs to reshape how we think of body image concerns.”

Eisenberg added that media images of women — which combine slenderness with a toned, firm and muscular look — could be a driving force in women’s attitude over  the use of performance-enhancing substances and behavior. Only that, this hasn’t been emphasized in past research.

“Parents, pediatricians and other health care providers need to be aware that these behaviors are happening, and even if a teen looks muscular and healthy, he or she may still be participating in unhealthy behavior to achieve the ‘perfect’ body,” Eisenberg added. “Adults should start talking to teens about muscle-enhancing behavior as they would any other harmful behavior.”

Over the last 20 years, a string of reports have indicated that a growing number of non-athletes are also abusing anabolic steroids to beef up their bodies. What these people might be missing is that, prolonged use of the drug may severely impact their visuospatial memory, according to a new study published online in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence.

Researchers from McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School investigated 44 individuals, aged 29-55, with 31 having used AAS for an average of seven years, the Science Daily reports. Each participant was asked to complete five cognitive tests that assessed a wide range of brain functions, including memory for shapes and locations of objects, memory for lists of words, reaction time, ability to maintain attention, and speed of information processing.

The researchers found that long-term AAS users have poor score than nonusers on a test called “Pattern Recognition Memory,” where participants are asked to try to remember a collection of patterns that they have been presented on a computer screen.

“Our work clearly shows that while some areas of brain function appear to be unaffected by the use of AAS, users performed significantly worse on the visuospatial tests that were administered. Those deficits directly corresponded to their length of use of anabolic-androgenic steroids,” explained McLean Hospital Research Psychiatrist Harrison Pope, MD. “Impaired visuospatial memory means that a person might have difficulty, for example, in remembering how to find a location, such as an address on a street or a room in a building.”

Pope and colleagues are not sure whether extended use of AAS could result to cognitive defects, but they are hoping that their findings would lead to larger studies and increased awareness regarding the possible dangers of anabolic steroids abuse.

In a new study of nearly 3,000 kids and teens at 20 different middle and high schools in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area, about five percent were found to have used anabolic steroids to put on muscle, the Reuters reports.

“Really the pressure to start using (steroids) is in high school,” said Dr. Linn Goldberg, from Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, who was not involved in the study. “You get the influence of older teens in high school, so when you’re a 14-year-old that comes in, you have 17-year-olds who are the seniors, and they can have great influence as you progress into the next stage of your athletic career.”

According to the study, majority of the surveyed kids were poor or middle-class. While student-athletes were more likely to use most methods of muscle-building, steroids use was equally common among athletes and non-athletes.

Aside from steroids, more than one-third of boys and one-fifth of girls  who participated in the survey admitted taking protein powder or shakes to gain muscle mass, and between five and ten percent used non-steroid muscle-enhancing substances, such as creatine. The study, which appeared on Monday in the journal Pediatrics, also found Asian students were three to four times more likely to have used steroids in the past year than white students.

The researchers point out the media as one of the driving factors for  teens to engage in anything that would make them get tone.

Anabolic steroids have become popular in professional sports, including baseball, football and boxing. But aside from enhancing muscles, steroids use has also been linked to other ugly side effects, such as acne, baldness, insomnia, infertility, risk of cardiovascular disease, and depression.

In the field of sports, anabolic steroids have been strictly banned and professional athletes who were caught using them were stripped off with victories. Schools and local government units across the nation have also taken concerted efforts to combat anabolic steroid abuse among students by disseminating steroids awareness campaigns and workshops that discuss the dangers associated with steroids use.

If you’re a parent to a teenager, it’s all the more important to have an open communication at home so that you can easily educate your youngsters about anabolic steroids without scaring them away or sounding like a broken record. Providing your teenagers with correct information is key to making them understand why it’s important to stay away from anabolic steroids. There have been studies indicating that teenagers or children who do not partake in steroids and other substance of abuse during their younger years are much less likely to use drugs when they reach adulthood.

Keeping your teenagers well-informed is a good approach to deter them from using anabolic steroids in the first place. The more aware they are about steroids abuse, the better they can make good judgment and decision in handling peer pressures and the temptation of steroids use.

When a steroid user enters a drug rehab, s/he is first assessed by the facility administrator or a counselor through a one-on-one interview to determine the type of addiction treatment needed. Counseling is typically given after detox, as a way of helping the patient avoid relapse. Some of the primary benefits of counseling programs for steroid users include:

Providing a Place to Express Him/Herself. Through counseling therapy, the steroid user is able to find a place where s/he can honestly voice out her/his thoughts without the fear of being unfairly judged. While the participant will usually find the first session somewhat uncomfortable and intimidating, a well-trained counselor will be able to help and encourage the steroid user to talk about the driving force behind steroid addiction.

Providing a Place for Support. One of the reasons why people abuse drugs, like steroids, is due to the feeling of being isolated or alienated. In group counseling, however, steroid users would feel a sense of belongingness, which is crucial in making them feel that they can be happy and live their life without using steroids or any illegal drugs.

Providing Education and Practical Training. Among the highlights of counseling programs is educating the participants about the dangers and the effects of anabolic steroids, and providing them training that will enable them to develop new skills. They are taught new habits and new ways to deal with drug users that they might encounter outside the facility. Such efforts will be very helpful to the steroid use of protecting him/herself with the temptation of relapse.

As expected, hundreds of answers were given, each varying from person to person, but all answers were given corresponding “reality checks” so as to correct the misguided minds of most teenagers.

One of the most common responses among the participants was that drugs made them feel good. Drug users and addicts usually take these substances for pleasure and the sensations of euphoria which differs depending on the type of drugs. Cocaine, for example, can bring about a certain “high” boosting self-confidence and energy, while opiates like heroin causes feelings of satisfaction and relaxation.

The drug effects may give temporary escape from whatever worries and problems people may have, but after the effects subside, the same problems stay and solutions are still at loss. Situations can become worse when a person becomes addicted and he fails to have his regular dose and unpleasant symptoms of withdrawal occur like headache, nausea, and even mental problems.

Kids also said that drugs help them perform better, in academics and in athletics. It is true that drugs enhance one’s abilities which could lead one to continue with the habit. Yet these drugs called “performance-enhancing drugs” outweigh their positive effects with their negatives. Steroids, as an example, promotes breast growth among men and gives females deeper voices and more unwanted body hairs. More serious consequences of such drugs include heart failure and seizures.

Teens also said, “Everybody’s doing it.” In their quest to fit in and be accepted in groups, teens easily succumb to peer pressure and get into risky behaviors. This is why it is very important for kids to have strong values foundation to help them think before they do something dangerous and help them realize the damages that drugs can bring into their lives.

The NFL was instrumental in creating the program. Together with the ATLAS (Adolescents Training and Learning to Avoid Steroids) and ATHENA (Athletes Targeting Healthy Exercise and Nutrition Alternatives), the program promotes healthy living and winning in competitions without the use of drugs, particularly steroids, which has been used to enhance performance in sports events.

Track and Field coach Stephanie Toole from Lakewood High says the program is very effective in empowering students and athletes to make the right decisions to become better leaders of their teams. Coaches from John Hay also echo the same benefits from the program, saying that school athletes become more resilient when faced with the temptation to use steroids, and that they are better at saying ‘no’ to these addictive substances.

Students from the local schools are glad that such a program exists to help them go through the challenges a lot easier. John Hay student Ogechi Onyeukwu says “the problems, the conflicts, and the struggles of peer pressure, smoking, and drinking and taking steroids…I’m just honored to be able to be around people that go through the same problems as me and are facing the struggles… and are able to discuss how to overcome them.”

The same sentiment is felt among Lakewood students. Student Jay Andreani states that the program helps those who think that taking drugs is alright. He says the idea that drugs is not necessary to be successful has been lost especially on those who are on the competitive side. The program is the answer to bring back this awareness into the school population.