What Steroids Do to The Body

 What Steroids Do to The Body

Have you ever wondered what steroids do to the human body now you might think that steroid use mostly only applies to professional athletes however the majority of individuals using these substances are recreational athletes that everyday person you might see working out at the gym with a high number of those being weightlifters and bodybuilders who use them to improve overall muscle size strength and personal appearance?

The good and the bad like can they cause a guy's testicles to shrink a woman to grow hair in funny places and are there any more serious long-term health consequences associated with steroid use we have a lot of cool things to discuss so let's do this so first what are steroids well there are many different types of steroids the steroids.

From here on out, androgenic steroids are different from prednisone, an anti-inflammatory steroid that you may have heard about. Prednisone is used to treat inflammatory conditions. However, these androgenic steroids that we are focusing on are used to increase muscular size and athletic performance. They are synthetic variations of the main male Androgen, testosterone. Androgen is a hormone that promotes the development of masculine characteristics, and again, testosterone is the primary androgen.

Androgen produced in males and females produces some testosterone in the ovaries and even in the adrenal gland, specifically, the adrenal cortex's outer portion. However, the overall production is much less than in males. Since these androgenic steroids are synthetic variations of testosterone, let me quickly explain the process of testosterone production. This will help us have an even better understanding of how the steroids work and even help us understand some of the side effects.

Starts in the brain in this structure at the Central core of the brain referred to as the hypothalamus we seem to talk a lot about the hypothalamus in our videos lately but regardless just to orient you this is A sagittal cut so a cut through the midline here and if you were to go straight back like right between your eyebrows you'd run into this hypothalamus here now the hypothalamus will secrete a hormone called gonadotropin-releasing hormone and just take a moment to think about that name gonadotropin gonad implies.

It is going to affect the gonads the testes are the over and tropins are just hormones that cause other hormones to be released which we're going to see in just a second so the hypothalamus releases this gonadotropin-releasing hormone and it releases it into these tiny blood vessels that travel from the hypothalamus directly to this structure here called the pituitary gland specifically the anterior portion of the pituitary gland and these blood vessels is referred to as the hypophysial.

The portal veins hypothesis is just another name for the pituitary gland hence the name hyphal portal veins now this gonadotropin-releasing hormone that comes from the hypothalamus is in the pituitary gland and this activates certain cells within the anterior pituitary to secrete two other hormones called follicle stimulating hormone and luteinizing hormone so now you can see this connection of how the gonadotropin-releasing hormone caused other hormones to be released.

Taking steroids exhibits these symptoms and some of the more random side effects of  tendon ruptures like biceps and tricep tendon ruptures appear to be more likely in weightlifters that use androgenic steroids and those that inject the steroids can be more at risk for infections at the actual sight of injection and more at risk for systemic infections like Hepatitis B hepatitis C and HIV if they were to share needles so hopefully you learned some cool information about how steroids work and some of the potential