Do anabolic steroids cause liver damage?
There are a lot of people which believe that anabolic steroids are causing liver damage. And in many ways, they are right. The idea here is that these synthetic drugs are beneficial for your body, but they are also coming with their own set of side effects s as well. With that in mind, the reason why anabolic steroids can cause liver damage comes from their inclusion of an alkyl group directly to the 17th carbon.
Strain
Ideally, the anabolic steroids would go through the liver intact. But what happens here is these tend to put strain on the liver functions. As a result, the experience is not as good, and you need to do all you can in order to combat this issue the best way you can.
Enzymes
The way anabolic steroids can affect the liver is simply by affecting the enzymes. The steroids are interfering with the hepatic triglyceride lipase, and this carries your cholesterol via your blood while also degrading HDL.
As you can imagine, once the enzyme levels are lower, the HDL levels will increase. As a result, the cardiovascular disease risks will increase too. This doesn’t happen right away. And that’s why plenty of people that use anabolic steroids don’t really see the truth.
Yes or no?
But yes, it doesn’t matter if you use regular or injectable steroids, all of these can lead to such results and that’s the reason why you have to address this problem as fast as possible. But mainly oral steroids affect the liver more then the injectables!
The inflammation you can find here will start to increase the liver cell size. As a result, you will have a bile buildup, and that leads to cholestasis. Again, this only happens when you use anabolic steroids on an extended period of time. It doesn’t appear right away, and that’s maybe what makes the entire experience so challenging for steroid users. Be sure that you cycle has the right duration, do not extend it to extremly long time period.
Symptoms
The way you can identify any liver damage from anabolic steroids is via the overall symptoms. These include things like nausea or vomiting, loss of appetite, itching, dark urine, abdominal pain, chronic fatigue and other similar stuff. If these things appear, then you need to make sure that you address the problem right away. It’s really challenging to handle stuff like this, so knowing how to assess and deal with such a problem is extremely important. It’s certainly not a walk in the park, but that’s the reason why anabolic steroids are so crucial to begin with.
In the end, what you have to understand here is that anabolic steroids can sometimes lead to liver damage. And the problem is that understanding the liver damage and knowing what causes it can be very important. It’s not an easy thing for sure, but it can surely bring in front some huge challenges along the way. Try to use that to your advantage and make sure that you don’t use the anabolic steroids for a very long time. If you on a cycle, be sure that at the end of it your body needs rest from AAS. Minimal "off time" is an exact same time period as your previous cycle. This way you can avoid any major complications. Of course, seeking some medical help will be the right thing to do if problems occour.