Girls Turning To Steroid Use Athletic Opportunity Pushing Illegal Drug

With more scholarships available and even pro careers opening up for female athletes, high school girls are venturing into dangerous territory once thought reserved for boys: anabolic steroid use.

A new Penn State University study - published this month in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, an American Medical Association journal - indicates that as many as 175,000 high school girls have used steroids. Some take the illegal drugs to become leaner, others use them to build more muscle.

“There are popular assumptions out there that boys want to build the muscle and therefore take steroids, and that girls want to get lighter and so have an anorexia problem or an eating disorder,” said Donna Lopiano, executive director of the Women’s Sports Foundation. “It’s not that simple.”

About six years ago, steroid use among high school students bottomed out in response to new laws, according to surveys. Since then steroid use among boys has remained about the same, but it has increased among girls, according to the Penn State study.

The research is based on three national surveys and 18 more limited questionnaires given to students in 10 states. One showed that 2.4 percent of girls in ninth to 12th grades nationally - about 175,000 teenagers - say they have used steroids at least once. Twice as many boys reported using steroids.

A continuing national study showed that the percentage of eighth-grade girls who reported using steroids rose to 1.4 percent in 1996 from 0.8 percent in 1991. In 10th-graders, the use increased to 1.1 percent from 0.5 percent over the five-year period.

Over the same time, the number of boys reporting steroid use stayed level at 2 to 3 percent.

The numbers among females may sound small, but study author Charles Yesalis said there is cause to worry.

“Does this concern me as much as tobacco use? Absolutely not,” he said. “But neither do I think it’s appropriate to say in any way, shape or form that it’s not a big deal.”

Women using anabolic steroids - usually taken orally or by injection - can suffer from shrinkage of the breasts, male hair growth, deepening of the voice and menstrual problems.

“Those are permanent side effects,” Yesalis said. “It’s like a tattoo.”

Other long-term effects include cardiovascular, liver or reproductive illnesses.

Yesalis believes three trends are at play: the rise of women’s sports, the misdirection of anti-steroid education away from girls, and what he calls an increasingly popular “lean” look advanced by actresses and models - which can be more easily achieved with help from steroids.

Claire Cavanaugh, a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania and a former high school basketball player, said she never knew of any of girls using steroids. However, because of the pressure, she is not surprised.

“A lot of people’s parents were making them go here, making them go there and do all that basketball stuff,” Cavanaugh said. “Because of all the money that’s involved, if your kids show any kind of talent, their parents are looking at dollar signs” in the form of scholarships.

MEMO: A shorter version of this story ran in the sports section on Monday, December 15, 1997, page C3, under the headline: Steroid usage goes up among female athletes.