Research

Hormonal

Cessation of anabolic steroid use can lead to partial reversal of cardiac hypertrophy and improvement in left ventricular function, though fibrosis may persist.

If you stop using anabolic steroids, your heart function (how well it pumps) and wall thickness may improve significantly within months. However, the scarring (fibrosis) inside the heart muscle may not go away. This means you are not 'cured' of the risk, but your prognosis is better than if you continued use.

ModerateQualifiesMEDIUM confidence
After cessation of the use of anabolic steroids in the other patient with heart failure, left ventricular wall thickness reduced quickly from 12 to 10-5 mm, and fractional shortening increased from 14% to 27%.
Markku S. Nieminen et al. · European Heart Journal · 1996

Why this rating

Based on case observations of two patients showing improvement.

Source

Serious cardiovascular side effects of large doses of anabolic steroids in weight lifters

Markku S. Nieminen et al. · European Heart Journal · 1996

DOI 10.1093/oxfordjournals.eurheartj.a014724

case_series · n=4Cited 177×
Read the paper
DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10

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