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Steroid Use in Adolescents
Funder: NIDA
Start Date: 2008
Adolescent males use Anabolic Steroids (AS) to help improve their athletic performance or physical appearance. The use of AS poses serious health risks and is illegal unless prescribed by a physician. Over the past several years the use of AS among adolescent males has become an issue of pressing concern. The proposed project will examine the feasibility of applying the Gateway Hypothesis to a specific class of drugs, i.e., performance enhancing substances (PES) to help identify factors that increase the likelihood of AS use Specifically the study will: 1) establish evidence for an association between the use of legal PES and the use of AS, 2) identify mechanisms responsible for the relationship, 3) gather psychometric data on instruments that can be used in a larger scale study and 4) identify factors critical for interventions targeting legal PES use.
The project will employ a cross-sectional design to test the feasibility of the Gateway Hypothesis to predict anabolic steroid use. The project team will also gather psychometric data on instruments that will be used in a future longitudinal study of Gateway and AS use. Using legal PES places adolescents at increased risk of AS use and suggests that interventions targeting lower order substances might be useful in preventing the use of AS. A final aim is to identify the most relevant content and most influential sources of such information.
Investigators
Tonya Dodge, Ph.D., Skidmore College (PI)
Rob Turrisi, Ph.D., Penn State (PI on Penn State Subcontract)