Brought to you by Angela
Muscles in mice on steroids grew larger (right) than in mice that hadn’t
been taking the drugs (left). And the effects of steroids lingered long
after the mice stopped receiving the drug.
J.C. BRUUSGAARD/ UNIVERSITY OF OSLO
10 comments:
This article proved that when mice are treated with steroids, their muscle mass increases drastically. It increases 60 percent and when a muscle is cut, the muscle mass increases about 50 percent. That means when they use steroids and they have a cut muscle, the muscle mass almost doubles. The weird thing is that even if a mouse’s steroid wears off, the muscle mass grows faster than a regular mouse. If this is ever tested on humans, I think that humans would produce similar results.
I found this article very interesting. I have never learned much about steroids before. The main point of the article "Mice on Steroids" was that steroids can last a very long time, more than ten years, with an immense increase nuclei (sixty-six percent more) than the normal muscle, which has one hundred nuclei. If you were to cut the mouse muscle, then that would make the surrounding muscles work harder and would increase the number of nuclei by fifty percent which isn't as much as if the mouse was on steroids. Kristian Gundersen and his team found that the steroids still make the animal have more muscle even after they wear off. Since steroids are illegal, the athlete taking it would be banned from playing sports for over ten years! But why did the scientists choose to test on female mice? Why not male? Is there some sort of reason behind that? This article did show what steroids could do to people that we may not have known before.
I found this article very cool. I had no idea that the effects of steroids can last so long. If this effect persists in humans just as it persists in mice, then athletes taking steroids should probably need to be banned for ten years... I found it very interesting that if you cut one of the muscles of a mouse, the neighboring muscles are forced to work harder and become stronger with a large increase in nuclei. When adding steroids, nuclei in the surrounding muscles of the cut muscles almost doubled. Of course, nuclei also increased in the muscles of mice without cut muscles greatly. Overall, mice on steroids go through a dramatic increase in muscle mass.
After I read the article, I immediately thought that not only were these steroids (when used by athletes) unfair in sports, but they are also pretty dangerous. When the mice take steroids, the muscle mass increases by 66 percent-more than half of the original muscle mass. That's like adding a whole half scoop to your original scoop of ice cream. This could be dangerous if it had the same effect on humans! First of all, the muscles would grow so much that it might actually be hard to participate in sports. Second, the increased muscles by chemical almost make you part mutant (in a way): with muscles more than 1.5 times the original size! I think athletes should know this and consider the dangers of steroids before taking them. Overall I give the article 9.5 out of 10 points.
Just a funny comment: there are a lot of articles about mice this week.
I enjoyed this article because I didn't know that steroids lasted 10 years. I thought you had to keep taking steroids in order for it to keep working. I also did not know that steroids increases the size the the nuclei in side of their cells. Another reason that I enjoyed this article is that when the mice stop taking the steroids, they double the about of nuclei in their cells. This is what I thought of this article.
When I was reading this article I was fascinated by the idea that basketball teams best players could be a lie. They may have taken drugs years before to strengthen their muscles and then waited for the drug traces to wear off while their muscles are sill filled with extra nuclei.
I found this article very interesting. I've heard people talk about steroids, but never knew the science of them. It is pretty cool how steroids make people more muscular by taking a medication that multiplies the nuclei and the nuclei pumps out more muscle. I also didn't realize that if a person took steroids it would last for ten years. I did some research and there are a lot of side effects when people take steroids. For example, it can cause kidney and liver problems. That can be dangerous for a person's health.
This article proved to me that the tests done on athletes, like said in the article, may not do much good. If humans produce the same results as the mice, the average athlete could do so much more than before, even decades after they took the steroids. My dad had told me about steroids and the tests that they do. He said that the real point of steroids is to increase muscle growth, and I think with this study we now know that steroids are a little too powerful for our bodies.
This is a very fascinating article. I can’t believe that steroids effected mice in such an interesting way. This article mentioned that there will probably never be a way to prove if humans are effected by steroids the same way mice are. But, if there were a way, and if that way proved that humans and mice are both effected by steroids the same way, the world of sports would change forever. Since 2005, Major League Baseball has had to suspended around fifty players. Football has also had its share of suspensions. If humans react the same way to steroids as mice, the athletes who have used steroids in the past gained an even more unfair advantage then we previously believed to be true. In order to completely eliminate steroids from their bodies, those athletes would have had to suffer at least a ten-year suspension. Even then, if humans are effected the same way as mice were, the athletes who took steroids would continue to be able to build up muscle mass much quicker than players who were honest from the beginning. In addition, the article said that even if a body shows no indication of taking steroids, that body may still be the effects of steroids. This means that the tests designed to see if someone is taking steroids could be faulty. Of course, this is only true if humans react the same to steroids as mice. In conclusion, this is a very interesting article, and the tests are very cool. However, after reading this article, I formulated a few questions. First, I was wondering if there was a specific reasons for conducting these tests. Was is to see exactly how steroids work? Or, did they do it in the hopes that one day they will be able to see if mice and humans react the same way to steroids. Of course, even if there is a not a clear reason, it was interesting and educational for the scientists. Another question I thought of after reading this article was, why mice? Is it just that they are easy to study on, or is there another reason? Regardless, I thought this article was really amazing. It is unfortunate that scientists will probably never know if humans react the same way to steroids the same way as mice are.
Whenever I see an article from this website, I usually have a lot of bad things to say. Unusually, I really enjoyed this article. Steroids have been a problem for people who compete in sports. This article showed something extremely important: steroid effects can last for up to 10 years, plus or minus. Even though the muscles shrink down, the nuclei still remain. To experiment, the scientists cut a muscle. If you don't know about how this works, here it is: When a muscle is cut, the neighboring muscles must work harder to make up for the muscle's work. One of the most miraculous parts is that once the muscles shrink back down, you still have the ability to grow muscle mass faster. It would be extremely informative if sports steroid testers read this article. After researching, I found that male mice exposed to steroids die shorter than those exposed to less steroids. This could mean that people on steroids die shorter. This was a year long test, so in proportion, this could be serious. Life over muscle: Here is the article.
Adult male laboratory mice were exposed for 6 months to a combination of four anabolic-androgenic steroids of the kinds and at the relative levels to which human athletes and body builders expose themselves. The four steroids included testosterone, two 17-alkylated steroids, and an ester, and they were given at doses that totaled either 5 or 20 times normal androgenic maintenance levels for mice. By the time the survivors were 20 months old (1 yr after the termination of steroid exposure), 52% of the mice given the high dose of steroids had died compared with 35% of the mice given the low dose and only 12% of the control mice given no exogenous hormones (P < 0.001). Autopsy of the steroid-treated mice typically revealed tumors in the liver or kidney, other kinds of damage to these two organs, broadly invase lymphosarcomas, or heart damage, and usually more than one of these conditions. It can be concluded that the life span of male mice is decreased dramatically by exposing them for 6 months to the kinds and relative levels of anabolic steroids used by many athletes and body builders.
Post a Comment