Sen. George Mitchell’s 409-page report on performance-enhancing drugs in baseball describes a thriving underground market for steroids and human growth hormone. What began with just a few players and trainers expanded into a network of dozens, if not hundreds, of professional athletes. That network grew year by year as the players referred their friends and teammates.

Below, we present the findings of the Mitchell report as a social network. Players are connected to the person who first introduced them to the Mitchell report’s star witness, Mets batboy turned personal trainer Kirk Radomski. In some cases, players met Radomski directly; in other cases they are several degrees apart. The statistical and visual analysis that went into making this chart was done using SocialAction, a software tool developed by Adam Perer and Ben Shneiderman at the University of Maryland’s Human-Computer Interaction Lab.

How many degrees of separation between every baseball player in the steroid social network?

While Congress is preparing to focus on baseball players alleged to have taken the drugs, medical experts are warning that steroids and human growth hormone are being illegally prescribed nationwide at an alarming rate under the misconception they will aid healing, enhance looks, strength and speed, or slow aging.

I was under the impression that the medical community finally conceded that anabolic steroids DO increase muscle size and DO improve athletic performance. The role of testosterone and growth hormone in “age management medicine” is still hotly debated and many experts see therapeutical potential for aging populations.

Dr. Shalender Bhasin, professor of medicine at Boston University and chief of endocrinology at Boston Medical Center, has dedicated his life to researching the therapeutic potential of anabolic therapies for diseased, frail, and elderly populations.

Frailty in the elderly is a huge public health problem… It’s a problem for the patient and their families. . .  The cost of lost quality of life is incalculable. There’s a huge societal benefit to developing anabolic therapies.

Dr. Bhasin is frustrated that the negative attention given to the use of anabolic steroids by athletes detracts from the therapeutic potential of anabolic therapies such as testosterone:

The steroid scandals make it seem like testosterone is not a legitimate area for research.

This is unfortunate and not helped by the style of journalism seen by Brendan Lyons that broadly discounts therapeutic potentials of steroids in his reporting.

 http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/storyprint.asp?StoryID=654817

http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2006/08/27/tour_de_france_testosterone_flap_shines_new_light_on_bostons_expert_in_hormones_surprising_softer_side?mode=PF

CMPB executive director, Steve James, explains the intent of the commercials in a press release:

While the commercials parody the recent baseball scandal, the spots effectively use humor to bring out the truth about the health benefits of drinking milk… By pouring, everyone, not just athletes, can have strong bones and muscles. Milk is indeed a ‘Super Drink.’”

When the commercials originally aired, some people felt they trivialized the issue of steroids in sports. Steroid advocates were amused that the commercials also (unintentionally) highlighted the arbitrariness of performance enhancing substances that society chooses to stigmatize and sports decide to ban.

The steroids in baseball spoofs will air through the end of January 2008.

http://www.marketwire.com/mw/rel_us_print.jsp?id=806473

But apparently this was not within the scope of their investigation. Instead, investigators relied on a survey of bodybuilders and weightlifters to document and determine the manner, methods, and quantities of anabolic steroids used by professional baseball players and presumably all competitive athletes. 

The adverse side effects of anabolic steroids used at the levels necessary to achieve these [performance-enhancing] effects can be significant, however. In part, this is because the doses of anabolic steroids typically used by athletes are much higher than those that would be prescribed for any legitimate therapeutic use, between 5 and 30 times greater than the level of testosterone naturally produced by the body.

Steroid use by competitive bodybuilders and steroid use by baseball players are apples and oranges.. The extreme use of anabolic steroids by competitive bodybuilders does not represent the quantities used by 95% of competitive athletes in various other sports. Equating the dangers of extreme steroid use in bodybuilders with typical steroid use in MLB players is inaccurate and misleading.

It is apparently irrelevent to the authors of the Mitchell Report; they entered with the assumption that all non-therapeutic anabolic steroid use will have serious adverse effects on the athlete; steroids could not be used at any level without dangerous side effects. Essentially, all steroid use was considered abuse by the Mitchell Report.

Advocates of illicit steroid use by athletes argue that the adverse side effects have been exaggerated, focusing their arguments on the limited clinical trial data available. Medical ethics have prevented the scientific study of the massive doses of steroids taken by athletes using these drugs to obtain an athletic advantage. Despite this limitation, however, there are sufficient data to conclude that there is an association between steroid abuse and significant adverse side effects.

And the “sufficient data” that Senator Mitchell cites to arrive at the conclusion of “significant adverse side effects” in MLB players using steroids is based on – you guessed it – competitive amateur bodybuilders! Apples and oranges.

The irony is that on the very same page where Senator Mitchell asserts the “significant adverse effects” of steroids, he actually cites a study on athletic performance that reflects dosages that are more likely to be used by professional baseball players and as well as the majority of competitive athletes.

S. Bhasin, et al., The Effects of Supraphysiologic Doses of Testosterone on Muscle Size and Strength in Normal Men, 335 New Eng. J. of Med. 1-7 (1996)

This study revealed an “absence of systemic toxicity” and no increase in the “occurrence of angry behavior” during the administration of a 10-week 600mg/week testosterone enanthate cycle.

In spite of Mitchell’s statement that such a study would not exist due to “medical ethics,” he is most certainly aware of its existence since he cited it. The likely explanation is that he remains ignorant to the quantities and cycles of steroids used by baseball players and athletes in general.

Not all anabolic steroids are created equally in terms of side effects. Nor do all dosages and manners of steroid administration result in the same side effects.