The End Of Androstenedione?

[WillBrink]

The End of Andro?
By Will Brink, Bill Roberts, and Rick Cohen M.D.; © 1998

It was only a few years ago that androstenedione exploded onto the bodybuilding scene touted as the greatest thing since the invention of the squat rack for building muscles. For a while, androstenedione was bodybuilding's little secret as the outside world was oblivious to the fact that people all over the country were popping this testosterone precursor like candy in hopes it would increase their muscle mass. That all changed with the Mark McGwire fiasco and now "andro" has become virtually a household name. Then came the mother of all anti-andro sound bites for the media, a major study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (King DS, Sharp RL, Vukovich MD, et al. Effect of oral androstenedione on serum testosterone and adaptations to resistance training in young men. JAMA. 1999;281:2020-2028) that painted a very negative picture of androstenedione. The media then compared "andro" to those evil steroids on the ten o'clock news in their standard "don't confuse us with the facts" style of journalism. Of course androstenedione's Achilles heel has been the fact that so little research existed, no one could say either way what it did exactly or if it had any health risks associated with its long term use. Research is a slow and expensive endeavor and many mistakes can be made along the way. In 1998 and 99, several studies were conducted on the andro products to see what, if any, claims held up. Though we now appear to have limited research on some of the andro products, in particular androstenedione, we are nowhere near answering the long list of questions we have on this compound and much of the research done to date has minimal if any usefulness in the real world. This article attempts to take a look at the research to date and hopefully clear up some of the crazy claims being made by both the pro and anti-andro camps.

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[Robert Johnson]

nice article,. like your page will