Studying the amount of prevalence awareness and complications of anabolic steroids among the male athletes in Mashhad city

Nowadays despite the world minded against the use of steroids, unfortunately the use of these drugs is increased by athletes. The purpose of this study was to identify the amount of prevalence awareness and complications of anabolic steroids in male athletes. This study was a cross-sectional study in the city of Mashhad and included bodybuilding athletes. A questionnaire with 19 questions whose validity that already confirmed by 13 doping experts was used. Moreover, the reliability of the questionnaire was calculated through evaluation of the collected data from 30 participants and measuring the Cronbach›s alpha (α=0.80). The questionnaires were then distributed among 300 male athletes from eleven clubs that were randomly chosen as a cluster method. To analyze the data descriptive statistics (frequency, percentage, mean) and independent t-test were used. The results indicated about of 64% of athletes were used from steroid drugs. Data also indicated that there was a significant correlation between the history of the championship with the prevalence of drug use (p <0 /001) and the level of awareness (p < 0/003). Moreover, 86.9 percent of the participants believed that consuming of steroieds is necessary to win in sport events and 47 percent of them began the use of these drugs in the first year of their sport engagement. It seems that coaches and athletes haven’t enough knowledge about the affects of the steroids in the body, so they use a lot of these kind of drug. Therefore it is necessary to make comprehensive and educational course to improve the knowledge of athletes and coaches.