Prevalence of Dietary Supplements and Anabolic Steroids among Iranian Elite Athletes: a Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

Dietary supplements and anabolic steroids- frequently used by many athletes- are commercially available products consumed as an addition to the usual diet. The aim of this study was to carry out a meta-analytical and systematic review on all papers conducted on the prevalence of dietary supplements and medication among Iranian elite athletes.

This study is based on the PRISMA guideline on scientific data banks includes SCOPUS, Google Scholar, Web of Knowledge, PubMed, SID and Magiran. Finally, 13 articles including dietary supplements used by athletes (7 papers) and articles focusing on the consumption of anabolic steroid use (6 papers) were analyzed.

The meta-analytic evaluation revealed a general prevalence of 55% of dietary supplements among athletes. The results of the study indicated that there was a high heterogeneity between studies (coefficient I2 was 99.159, P-value less than 0.001). Also, meta-analytic evaluation showed an overall prevalence of 38.9% of anabolic steroids among athletes. The results of the study indicated that there was a high heterogeneity between the studies (coefficient I2 is 986.96, P-value less than 0.001).

Half of the elite Iranian athletes consume dietary supplements and one third of them use anabolic steroids. It seems that the frequency distribution of supplements’ consumption is influenced by different geographic areas.