For decades doctors have warned about the potential deadly side-effects of using performance enhancing drugs, but now a new study of 4,000 patients with diabetes published in in The New England Journal of Medicine proves just how dangerous Epo can be when used..even when used properly under a doctor's care.
The study looked at the impact of the drug when used as approved and compared patients using the drug to a placebo group.
To their surprise researchers discovered that those patients using Epo (a red blood cell boosting drug used by some endurance athletes to cheat) had a higher incidents of heart attacks and double the incident of strokes compared to the placebo group.
Plus, the New York Times reports, "the Epo group’s self-reported quality of life, their subjective sense of fatigue and illness, was barely better than with placebo."
"Going in, we had really expected” that Epo “would make people feel better and improve their outcomes,” says the study’s lead author Dr. Marc Pfeffer, a professor at Harvard University Medical School and senior physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
“We certainly had to reject that hypothesis,” he added.
Follow on twitter @everymantri or view latest videos on YouTube.
