Doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston spent 11 years trying to determine the cause of severe heart failure and multiple organ failures in a 50-year-old Massachusetts man. It turned out that throughout that time the man had been secretly taking a veterinary anabolic steroid intended to build muscle mass in cattle, infohub.kz reports.
The clinical case was published in the scientific journal New England Journal of Medicine and is reported by Ars Technica.
The man's health problems began at age 39 after he returned from the Caribbean: he was hospitalized with fever, shortness of breath, and acute kidney, liver and heart injury. His left ventricle was pumping only 21% of blood, against a normal rate above 50%, forcing doctors to place him on ECMO life support.
In the following years the man repeatedly consulted cardiologists, nephrologists, endocrinologists and hematologists, complaining of abdominal pain, blood pressure spikes, thick blood, fatigue and low testosterone, but doctors attributed the symptoms to a streptococcal infection, renal artery stenosis and sleep apnea.
In 2026, at age 50, he was hospitalized again after a vacation with a critical drop in cardiac output to 20%. After ruling out infections and autoimmune diseases, doctors focused on a combination of signs — enlarged breasts, fatty liver disease, insulin resistance and a muscular physique. After a delicate conversation, the patient admitted that for more than a decade he had been injecting himself in cycles with high doses of a synthetic testosterone derivative approved only for veterinary use.
Tests showed a testosterone level above 1,500 ng/dL, against a normal range of 249 to 836 ng/dL. Stopping the steroids and drug therapy restored the heart's pumping function to 49% within four months, but drug-induced hypogonadism and hormonal disorders persist eight months into treatment.
According to the authors of the article, between 2.9 and 4 million people in the United States use anabolic steroids, more than the number of people with HIV in the country.