Why Do Steroids Make Balls Smaller and Does the Same Thing Happen to Women’s Ovaries?

If
you ever won a competition, chances are high that you want to do it
again. So, if someone offers you an edge, temptation is high to use
it, no matter the cost. May it be a drink from the gods or an
injection by your coach – over the centuries there were a lot of
things people used to enhance their performance. Enter steroids.
But as with all drugs, these also come with some not so desired
effects, which brings us to the topic of the hour- Why Do Steroids
Make Your Balls Smaller? And does the same thing happen to women’s
ovaries?

To understand the answer to those questions, we must first look
at what exactly steroids are and how they affect the body. To begin
with, steroids are part of the huge family of lipids. We know them
best for their function as a storage for energy but without lipids
not a one of us would be sitting here, as one of their main
functions is as structural components in the cell membrane. But
lipids are also used as molecules which transfer signals in a
body.

For the topic at hand, we are only going to look at one molecule
– cholesterol. While most people have only heard of cholesterol for
potential clogging your arteries until you go belly up, among other
things, it’s also the starting substance if you want to make a
certain class of hormones – Steroid hormones to be exact.

Hormones are nothing else but chemical messengers your body is
using to control organ function and metabolism. Cholesterol can be
metabolized into different steroid hormones – depending on where in
your body the reaction takes place, different types of steroid
hormones are synthesised: in the cortex of the suprarenal gland,
the ovaries, the placenta or in the testicles – and yes, we will
get back to your balls soon. So hold tight…

So which hormones derive from cholesterol? There are the
glucocorticoids – you might know its most important representative:
the stress-hormone Cortisol. Then there are the mineralocorticoids
which regulate the salt and water balances in your body – their
primary representative is aldosterone. And then – drumroll please –
there are the male and female sex steroids. Primary function of the
sex steroids or sex hormones is the development of sexual
characteristics – they basically decide your sex in your mother’s
womb and then hit again quite hard during puberty.

But what has all of this to do with doping? In a word-
testosterone.

Testosterone, as the primary androgen or male sex hormone, has
two main effects: Virilization and Anabolism. It is responsible for
maturing the male sex organs before birth and the appearance of the
secondary sex characteristics during puberty, but one of its
effects is also the growth of muscle mass and strength.

That’s also, of course, the reason why in sports there are often
different sports leagues for men and women. Before a child hits
puberty there is no real significant sex difference in athletic
performance, but as circulating testosterone rises in males, so
does their physical advantages in strength, speed, and endurance.
These account for at least an 8% to 12% ergogenic advantage in
men.

This brings us back to your balls.

The observation that there is a connection between certain
characteristics and behaviours and the testicles is very old. First
castration of cattle and sheep took place during the Neolithic
period when humans first started farming. Fast-forward to the end
of the 19th century and the British physiologist and neurologist
Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard started to self-inject a secretion
from the testicles of freshly killed guinea pigs. He argued that
these auto-injections resulted in a rejuvenated body and an
increase in strength. Although the amount of testosterone in these
injections was probably too small to show any effects, he was,
essentially, the first human trying to dope himself with anabolic
steroids.

The German physician and pharmacologist Ernst Laqueur was
already part of a group who first described the female sex hormone
estrogen. Next, he successfully isolated testosterone from the
testicles of a bull in 1935.

From here, the misuse of testosterone in professional sports
started around the mid-20th century by Russian weightlifters.
During the 1954 World Weightlifting Championships in Vienna,
Austria, John Ziegler, a doctor accompanying the U.S. team, managed
to get the secret out of the USSR’s team doctor – over some vodkas,
of course. Back in the U.S. he started to experiment with
testosterone, first trying it out on himself, then on some
athletes. Accounts of the early successes vary – some say
testosterone had no effect, others say that they gained a lot more
strength than was expected from their training regime. The Doc kept
on experimenting and started to develop a synthetic substance that
was similar to testosterone but without its negative side-effects,
or at least, lessoned side-effects.

The drug was marketed in 1958 under the name Dianabol and was
intended to be used on severely debilitated patients like burn
victims where it could be used to help build up muscle with only a
minimum of activity. But Doc Ziegler also started some of his
weightlifters on the new drug. As the results on patients were
great, his intention was to see what the drug could do to healthy,
well-conditioned athletes. The doses regimen he used was very low
compared to what athletes used later on, but still the results were
outstanding.

From there the abuse of anabolic steroids spread, first in
professional sports but from the 1980s, also into the general
population – either to improve athletic performance or simply often
used by young men to improve personal appearance. In fact,
according to the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse, the biggest
group misusing steroids are male non-athlete weightlifters in there
20s or 30s.

But why is it so bad to use these drugs? To begin with, people
who misuse steroids often use dosages that are 10 to 100 times
higher than the doses which are usually prescribed for medical
conditions. As side-effects are usually dosage-dependent that makes
things even worse.