Anabolic steroids have always encouraged bodybuilders and other sportsmen to go for them but the use of steroids is not free from side effects. According to a paper presented at the American Society of Nephrology’s 42nd Annual Meeting and Scientific Exposition in San Diego, CA, athletes using steroids may suffer from damage to kidney function.

This previously unrecognized complication may occur when steroids are used on a habitual basis.

From Sciencedaily.com:

Reports of professional athletes who abuse anabolic steroids are increasingly common. Most people know that using steroids is not good for your health, but until now, their effects on the kidneys have not been known. Leal Herlitz, MD (Columbia University Medical Center) and her colleagues recently conducted the first study describing injury to the kidneys following long-term abuse of anabolic steroids. The investigators studied a group of 10 bodybuilders who used steroids for many years and developed protein leakage into the urine and severe reductions in kidney function. Kidney tests revealed that nine of the ten bodybuilders developed a condition called focal segmental glomerulosclerosis, a type of scarring within the kidneys. This disease typically occurs when the kidneys are overworked. The kidney damage in the bodybuilders has similarities to that seen in morbidly obese patients, but appears to be even more severe.

This study was conducted in the lab of Dr. Vivette D’Agati, MD at Columbia Univeristy Medical Center. Study co-authors included Glen Markowitz, MD, Joshua Schwimmer, MD, Michael Stokes, MD, Cheryl Kunis, MD, Vivette D’Agati, MD, (Columbia University Medical Center); Alton Farris, MD, and Robert Colvin, MD (Massachusetts General Hospital).

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Mark McGwire is a broken man these days, living with a conflicted soul. The name and recognition he received while playing baseball have suddenly started eluding him after he confessed using steroids during his illustratious career as a baseball slugger admired for hundreds of home runs.

McGwire insisted that his on-field performance was based on God-given talent and hand-eye coordination and not due to use of steroids.

From Sports.ESPN.Go.Com:

“It’s unfortunate I played in this era,” he said repeatedly, somehow failing to understand that he defined that era. In many ways, we’re still being played for fools.

He said his embarrassing, reputation-shrinking performance in front of Congress in 2005 was a result of his fear of putting his family, friends and teammates through the misery of the subpoena process. In the next breath, he says none of them ever knew — or even asked — whether he’d taken steroids. (Could be because they, like us, already knew.) He wanted to shield them from his “mistake.” A mistake is throwing the wrong kind of garbage in the recycling bin, not a decade-long, systematic program to use illegal drugs — undoubtedly under a doctor’s supervision — to help a baseball career.

(By the way, Costas killed. It was as though he’d been waiting for that interview for years. He knew his stuff. He brilliantly straddled the line between head-shaking disbelief and respect for his subject. He asked the right questions, struck the right tone and refrained from falling prey to McGwire’s displays of emotion.)

McGwire has always come across as conflicted, a private man in a public world. I found it telling that he said he kept nothing — presumably no ball, bat or uniform piece — as a memento of the record-breaking 1998 season. He considers it a testament to his selflessness, and maybe it is. It could also be a sign of guilt, reinforced by his decision to place a phone call to Pat Maris – Roger’s widow — Monday before his admission became public. More than anything, it is just plain sad.

Whatever may the future holds for this eminent baseball slugger, one thing that cannot be denied is that he has lost the respect that was once unique to him.

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Mark McGwire, the idol of many baseball players and newly appointed hitting coach of the Cardinals, recently walked into the winter warm-up to be greeted with a standing ovation and the song “Welcome to the Jungle.”

During his first public appearance since coming clean, McGwire made it sure that he easily evades all questions related to steroid use thrown at him. He said that he came clean and spoke honestly on Monday night on TV with Bob Costas and people should move on.

From LATimes.com:

“I was being as honest as I (could), from the heart. I got it off my chest and it’s something we can all move on from.”

Asked several times about allegations from former Oakland teammate Jose Canseco that he wasn’t telling the truth and whether he was familiar with specific names of steroids, this was his answer:

“Those names, yeah, I’m familiar with them but, like I said, I’m not going to go down that road with Jose,” he said. “I’ll take the high road with Jose.”

He was also asked if he really had never told Tony La Russa of his steroid use. La Russa, his manager in Oakland and St. Louis, had said he believed McGwire was clean.

“Absolutely. Tony La Russa, I kept this to myself,” he said.

It is believed that the steroid confession would relieve McGwire by lifting a huge weight off his still-large shoulders.

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A convicted drug dealer, Curtis Wenzlaff, who used to supply steroids to Mark McGwire as per his claims said that he believes that the baseball slugger was not completely truthful about the reasons behind him using performance-enhancing drugs in his interview with Bob Costas on the MLB Network on Jan. 11, 2010.

Wenzlaff said while speaking with ESPN’s “Outside the Lines” on Thursday that the goal of McGwire was to use steroids for getting “”bigger, faster, stronger” for improving his on-field performance.

From MLB.MLB.Com:

McGwire said in his interview with Costas that “in the winter ‘89 into ‘90, I was given a couple weeks worth, tried it, never thought anything of it, just moved on from it.”

It was only later, following the injury-ravaged 1993-94 seasons that McGwire says he once again began using PEDs to recover from injury. McGwire contends that his use from ‘94 on was a low-dose regimen designed solely to return him to health, not to augment his performance.

“I chuckled,” Wenzlaff said when asked his reaction to McGwire’s claim that he took steroids to heal from injury. “If excelling and kicking [butt] on the field is the end result, I guess that’s a healthy, good feeling. But for health, there are other things you can take for health that are anabolic, but it wouldn’t be that type of combination.”

Wenzlaff also said he thinks the combination of drugs he provided McGwire would’ve helped his hand-eye coordination.

“When you implement into what you are doing — for instance, hitting — an individualized, specialized program with muscle growth and explosiveness … while you’re on your drugs, it will improve your hand-eye coordination,” he said.

McGwire, the Cardinals’ newly appointed hitting coach, then reintroduced himself to St. Louis fans during the club’s Winter Warm-Up on Sunday and received a standing ovation.

This revelation is bound to dent image of the baseball slugger once more for sure.

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Injecting triamcinolone, the corticosteroid, directly into the eye can possibly slow down the progression of diabetic retinopathy, which is a complication of diabetes that may result in vision loss and blindness.

This finding was presented in a report in the December issue of Archives of Ophthalmology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

Proliferative diabetic retinopathy is a complication that occurs when new blood vessels form on the optic disc or another retina component.

From Sciencedaily.com:

Corticosteroids have been shown to interfere with the creation of new blood vessels, possibly by reducing the production of compounds that spur their growth, the authors note. However, steroids are also associated with other eye diseases.

“Use of this intravitreal [injected into the eye] corticosteroid preparation to reduce the likelihood of progression of retinopathy is not warranted at this time because of the increased risk of glaucoma and cataract associated with intravitreal steroid use,” the authors write. “Any treatment to be used routinely to prevent proliferative diabetic retinopathy likely needs to be relatively safe because the condition already can be treated successfully and safely with panretinal photocoagulation. Nevertheless, further investigation with regard to the role of pharmacotherapy for reduction of the incidence of progression of retinopathy appears to be warranted.”

The study was conducted by Neil M. Bressler, M.D., of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, and colleagues in the Diabetic Retinopathy Clinical Research Network conducted a study involving 840 eyes of 693 participants having macular edema.

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Researchers are moving ahead by testing progesterone in the quest to optimizing the effectiveness of the hormone for treating traumatic brain injury.

In this direction, two abstracts summarizing Emory research on the hormone were presented at the 2009 Society for Neuroscience (SFN) meeting in Chicago.

A multisite phase III clinical trial called ProTECT III will be initiated for examining the effectiveness of the hormone in the coming few months. The trial was developed by Donald Stein, PhD, Asa G. Candler Professor of Emergency Medicine at Emory School of Medicine.

From Sciencedaily.com:

One of the SFN abstracts reports on progesterone analogues that are more water-soluble. This work comes from Stein and his colleagues in collaboration with the laboratory of Dennis Liotta, PhD, Emory professor of chemistry.

Currently, the lack of water solubility limits delivery of progesterone, in that the hormone must be prepared hours ahead and cannot be kept at room temperature. Small chemical modifications may allow similar compounds with the same effects as progesterone to be given to patients closer to the time of injury.

According to the results, two compounds similar to progesterone showed an equivalent ability to reduce brain swelling in an animal model of traumatic brain injury.

The second abstract describes evidence that adding vitamin D to progesterone enhances the hormone’s effectiveness when applied to neurons under stress in the laboratory. Like progesterone, vitamin D is a steroid hormone that is inexpensive, has good safety properties and acts on many different biochemical pathways.

It was noted by the authors that a low amount of Vitamin D has the ability to boost progesterone’s ability to guard neurons from excito-toxicity, which is a principal cause of brain injury and cell death.

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The use of a steroid drug, methylprednisolone, in addition to a multiple sclerosis (MS) drug can prove to be a more effective combination for reducing the volume of disease activity than the use of MS drug alone.

This finding was presented as part of the Late-breaking Science Program at the American Academy of Neurology’s 61st Annual Meeting in Seattle, April 25 – May 2, 2009.

From Sciencedaily.com:

The study involved 341 people with relapsing-remitting MS. Half of the participants received both drugs; half received only the interferon drug plus a placebo. The participants were seen every three months during the three-year study for evaluation.

The participants had the disease for an average of three years and had not yet received a disease-modifying drug such as interferon.

Those who received both drugs had 38 percent fewer relapses, or times when the disease is active, than those receiving only the interferon drug. They also improved slightly on a test of MS disability, while the scores for the placebo group decreased slightly.

At the beginning of the study and again after three years, the researchers measured the size of lesions in the brain that are a sign of disease activity. For those receiving both drugs, the lesions stayed the same size or shrunk, while the size of the lesions grew for those taking only interferon.

Study author Mads Ravnborg, MD, of the Danish Multiple Sclerosis Research Center at Copenhagen University Hospital in Denmark, remarked that the results suggest that both drugs seem to have a synergy when taken as a combination and offer a more beneficial effect on the disease activity.

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According to scientists at the Carnegie Institution, a plant steroid is responsible for prompting two genes to battle against each other - one suppressing the other for ensuring that leaves grow normally in rice and the experimental plant Arabidopsis thaliana, which is a relative of mustard.

The results are expected to have critical implications for understanding as to how crop growth and yield can be manipulated. These results appeared in the December 15, 2009, issue of The Plant Cell.

From Sciencedaily.com:

Co-author Zhi-Yong Wang at Carnegie’s Department of Plant Biology explained the work: “We knew that the steroid is very important for activating genes that control cell growth in Arabidopsis as well as in rice. One of the most sensitive responses to the steroid is leaf bending in rice, caused by expansion of the upper cells at the joint between leaf blade and leaf sheath. We wanted to determine how the steroid functioned in rice. We found that the steroid affects two genes encoding (or producing) proteins that turn other genes on or off; they are called transcription factors. In rice, when a gene called Increased Leaf Inclination1 (ILI1) is turned on, it causes leaf bending. Interestingly, we found that the ILI1 protein also binds to another transcription factor, called IBH1, and inhibits its function. When there is too much ILI1 protein, the leaves bend excessively making the plant shaggy. When IBH1 level is high, cell growth is stopped at the joint and the rice is very erect, taking up less space. In normal rice plants the balance between ILI1 and IBH1 keeps growth in check.”

This pair of genes provides a unique tool to control the leaf angle, which is important for crop yield because erect leaves improve light capture and allows rice plants to be planted at higher density for a higher yield per hectare.

The list of study colleagues were from the following institutions: Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences; Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences; Department of Plant Biology, Carnegie Institution; Yonsei University, Korea; RIKEN Advanced Science Institute, Japan.

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According to a study by researchers from Johns Hopkins, a protein that was known to stimulate growth of blood vessel has now been found to be behind the cell overgrowth in the development of polyps characterizing one of the most severe forms of sinusitis.

Jean Kim, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor in the Departments of Otolaryngology and Allergy and Clinical Immunology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and a researcher at the Johns Hopkins Allergy and Asthma Center at the Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center, said that the sinusitis is not subtle in its nature.

From Sciencedaily.com:

Kim explains that surgery to remove the polyps is one of the most common treatments for this disease. However, nasal and sinus polyps in these patients almost always regrow. “Once the patient has entered the cycle of growing polyps, it’s very hard to get out,” she says. Another common treatment is oral steroids, but these drugs are fraught with many harmful side effects and also only temporarily treat the disease.

She and her Johns Hopkins colleagues have long studied sinusitis, often growing sinus cells isolated from patients in petri dishes. After noticing that cells from patients with polyps typically multiplied faster than cells from normal patients, the researchers speculated that cells from polyp patients might be producing extra amounts of some type of growth factor, a protein that encourages cell growth.

To identify which growth factor might be to blame, the researchers had sinusitis patients with and without polyps rinse their sinus passages with a wash solution, then tested the runoff for the presence of various growth factors. They found that solution from patients with polyps contained high amounts of a substance called vascular endothelial growth factor, or VEGF, a protein important for normal blood vessel growth that also seems to play a key role in a variety of diseases, including cancer. The more VEGF they found in a cell culture, the faster those cells grew.

This finding has given a new target to scientists to develop novel therapies for treating this disease form, which usually resist all present-day treatments.

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According to researchers from the Medical College of Georgia, a protein that is helpful in regulating expression of androgen receptors may prove to be a new focal point for staging and treating testosterone-fueled prostate cancer.

It was noted that levels of the protein, βarrestin2, were lower in certain prostate cancer cells than in normal prostate cells. It was also noted that the expression of testosterone-fed androgen receptors is higher in such cases.

The findings were reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Online Early Edition.

From Sciencedaily.com:

With increased numbers of androgen receptors, prostate cancer can make use of the limited testosterone available after a diseased prostate gland is removed or after testosterone production is blocked by drug therapy. In fact, the increased number of androgen receptors may mutate so they can start feeding off other steroids or even growth factors, Dr. Daaka says.

These wily skills help explain why cancer returns despite initially promising treatment results.

“It is clear that signaling by the androgen receptor is paramount for not only the initiation but also the progression of the disease, including escape to a hormone-refractory disease,” he says. Moves androgen receptors make to support cancer growth make it “unbeatable at this point,” for some patients.

However increased levels of βarrestin2 appear to halt the potentially deadly increase in androgen receptor expression, the MCG research team has found.

The study’s corresponding author, Dr. Yehia Daaka, Distinguished Chair in Oncologic Pathology in the MCG School of Medicine, said that an increase in the volume of androgen receptors is considered to be behind prostate cancer progression in men with advanced complication.

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