Once a cheater, always a cheater, a mouse study found — at least when it comes to steroids.
The result, reported in October, strongly implies that anabolic steroids like testosterone give doping athletes a competitive advantage for years — perhaps even decades — after they stop taking the drugs.
If antidoping agencies were to revise steroid bans based on the results, those caught cheating might effectively face lifetime expulsion from competition.
In the experiment, female mice dosed with testosterone bulked up their muscles considerably. Along with increasing the size of muscle fibers, the steroid-treated animals boosted the number of nuclei in their muscle cells by up to 66 percent, Kristian Gundersen of the University of Oslo and colleagues reported October 28 in the Journal of Physiology (SN: 11/30/13, p. 7).