Your Heart Grows on a Cycle Too

Opener

The heart is a muscle, and anabolic steroids grow muscle. The question that matters for anyone who uses them is what a cycle does to the heart while it's running, and whether that change goes away afterward. Most of what's been published can't answer that, because it compares users with non-users at a single point in time. You can't tell from that kind of study whether the steroids caused the difference or whether it was already there.

The HAARLEM study did something different. Dutch researchers led by Diederik Smit and Willem de Ronde scanned the hearts of the same men three times: before a steroid cycle, in the last week of it, and again after months off. Their echocardiography results were published in 2021 in Frontiers in Reproductive Health. This lecture goes through what changed, how big the changes were, what came back, and what the study can't tell you.

---

1. How the study worked

The researchers advertised on national television, in newspapers and on social media for men who were about to start a steroid cycle within two weeks. They didn't choose, change or supply anything. Each man ran the cycle he had already planned. To be sure the exposure was real, the cycle had to last at least 6 weeks, average at least 200 mg of androgens a week, and include at least two different compounds. Anyone who had used steroids in the previous 3 months was excluded.