Anabolic–androgenic steroid use is associated with psychopathy, risk-taking, anger, and physical problems
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Previous research has uncovered medical and psychological effects of anabolic-androgenic steroid (AAS) use, but the specific relationship between AAS use and risk-taking behaviors as well as between AAS use and psychopathic tendencies remains understudied. To explore these potential relationships, we anonymously recruited 492 biologically male, self-identified bodybuilders (median age 22; range 18-47 years) from online bodybuilding fora to complete an online survey on Appearance and Performance Enhancing Drug (APED) use, psychological traits, lifestyle choices, and health behaviors. We computed odds ratios and 95% confidence intervals using logistic regression, adjusting for age, race, education, exercise frequency, caloric intake, and lean BMI. Bodybuilders with a prior history of AAS use exhibited heightened odds of psychopathic traits, sexual and substance use risk-taking behaviors, anger problems, and physical problems compared to those with no prior history of AAS use. This study is among the first to directly assess psychopathy within AAS users. Our results on risk-taking, anger problems, and physical problems are consistent with prior AAS research as well as with existing frameworks of AAS use as a risk behavior. Future research should focus on ascertaining causality, specifically whether psychopathy is a risk associated with or a result of AAS use.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".