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Performance-Enhancing Drugs Have Negative Effects on Athletes’ Health

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Performance-enhancing drugs have negative effects on athletes’ health
Performance-enhancing drugs bring athletes the practical benefits, therefore, they use performance-enhancing drugs for some particular purposes. For example, some of the drugs contain narcotic, thus, athletes use those drugs to overcome pain. In addition, another drugs can also help athletes to increase their endurance, in this way, athletes can boost their endurance in the short time. What’s more, some performance-enhancing drugs help athletes perform better by improving their muscle mass and reducing fatigue. However, performance-enhancing drugs not only provide athletes with such advantages but also have negative effects on their health.
There are some commonly-used performance-enhancing drugs, such as anabolic steroids, erythropoietin and stimulants. Anabolic steroids is the most well-known performance-enhancing drugs. It can increase athletes’ muscle mass and strength, as a result, athletes’ bodies will not get tired easily. Besides, it also helps athletes to reduce muscle damage so that they can quickly recover from a hard workout. However, it is seriously forbidden by majority of sports organizations. That is, using anabolic steroids is illegal. What’s worse, if the athletes take high dose of anabolic steroids, they would suffer from some harmful effects, such as infertility, baldness and heart problems.
Another common-seen performance-enhancing drugs is erythropoietin. Erythropoietin is also known as EPO and it is a kind of hormone that is normally used to remedy anemia but some player will use it to boost their performance. The function of erythropoietin is to make athletes’ bodies produce much more red blood cells. In this way, the movement of oxygen to the muscles will be improved. Therefore, Erythropoietin is usually used by the endurance athletes. Nonetheless, if athletes use erythropoietin inappropriately, the risk of stroke and heart attack may increase. Even worse, it can cause to death.
The other performance-enhancing drugs is stimulants. Caffeine and amphetamines are common stimulants so taking stimulants will help stimulate athletes’ central nervous system. Besides, it will also increase athletes’ heart rate and blood pressure. Thus, stimulants can improve athletes’ endurance, reduce fatigue and increase athletes’ alertness and aggressiveness. Nevertheless, if athletes overdoes the stimulants, it may also weaken athletes’ performance on the sports fields. For instance, it will make them have difficulty to keep concentrating on the competitions. What’s worse, it may make athletes unable to fall asleep, heart stroke and some circulatory problems.
Despite the fact that performance-enhancing drugs bring a lot of short-term advantages that make athletes break through the limitation of physical in the competitions, these drugs also cause long-term health problem. If athletes abuse performance-enhancing drugs, it would threaten their health. It is evident that the cost of using performance-enhancing drugs is bigger than the benefits they make. Although most of the sports organizations have prohibited athletes from using performance-enhancing drugs, the government must also legislate to preclude these illegal behaviors happening again and again. It is not worthy to have the short sight for the victory and sacrifice the priceless health.

Work Cited
Mayo Clinic Staff. (2012, December 12). Performance-enhancing drugs: Know the risks. Retrieved from http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/fitness/in-depth/performance-enhancing-drugs/art-20046134?pg=2

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