Anabolic steroid and peptide hormones or growth factors are utilized to increase the performance of athletes of professional or amateur sports.

Despite their well-documented adverse effects, the use of some of these agents has significantly grown and has been extended also to non-athletes

with the aim to improve appearance or to counteract ageing. Pre-clinical studies and epidemiological observations in patients with an excess of

hormone production or in patients chronically treated with hormones/growth factors for various pathologies have warned about the potential risk

of cancer development and progression which may be also associated to the use of certain doping agents. Anabolic steroids have been described

to provoke liver tumours; growth hormone or high levels of its mediator insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1) have been associated with colon,

breast, and prostate cancers. Actually, IGF-1 promotes cell cycle progression and inhibits apoptosis either by triggering other growth factors or by

interacting with pathways which have an established role in carcinogenesis and cancer promotion. More recently, the finding that erythropoietin

(Epo) may promote angiogenesis and inhibit apoptosis or modulate chemo- or radiosensitivity in cancer cells expressing the Epo receptor, raised

the concern that the use of recombinant Epo to increase tissue oxygenation might favour tumour survival and aggressiveness.

Cancer risk associated to doping might be higher than that of patients using hormones/growth factors as replacement therapy, since enormous

doses are taken by the athletes often for a long period of time. Moreover, these substances are often used in combination with other licit or illicit

drugs and this renders almost unpredictable all the possible adverse effects including cancer. Anyway, athletes should be made aware that long-term

treatment with doping agents might increase the risk of developing cancer.

[taken from a pdf that can be found here: www.cenegenicsfoundation.org – entitled ‘Doping with growth hormone/IGF-1, anabolic steroids or

erythropoietin: is there a cancer risk?’ by Lucio Tentori ∗, Grazia Graziani, Department of Neuroscience, University of Rome]

so yeah, let them eat crack. let them all dope. they might die a premature death, but who gives a f*ck? it’s just the way the world is, right? our athletes are so driven to win, so blinded by the $ signs, so desperate to be praised and put on a pedestal for simply riding a bike fast or throwing a ball hard and accurately – skills which, just in case it need be mentioned, mean almost nothing to the kind of human being they are – that they will take the risk of having a cinder black colon by the time they’re 42.

and we can’t get enough of it. we’ve seen our sport’s stars driven to the bottle, the madhouse and the grave by whatever it was in them that made them do it and in us that cheered them on. more will die. right now there are men in their 40s who took all this crap who are pissing into bags or on their third stroke already, people you’ll never hear about cos they aren’t famous enough and they’re demise isn’t as spectacular as others. no, for them it’s a far more grisly, lingering descent into nothingness.

is the way it’s supposed to be? like many things in this world, i look at it all and figure it’s hard to conceive it could be any more wrong…