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Does Grape Seed Extract protect your heart and blood vessels when you're on steroids?
Supplementation with Grape Seed Extract may protect heart and blood vessels during the use of anabolic steroids such as boldenone. This is suggested by an animal study that researchers at the University of Tanta in Egypt published in Oxidative Medicine and Cellular Longevity.
Study
The researchers divided male lab rats into 4 groups. During the eight weeks that the experiment took, the reserachers didn't give any acitive substances to a first group of rats. [Control]
A second group received a large dose of a purified Grape Seed Extract twice a week via a gastric tube. This extract, produced by Merck, contained proanthocyanidins. [GSPE] If the rats had been humans, they would have received a dose of 700 milligrams of Grape Seed Extract twice a week.
A second group received a large dose of a purified Grape Seed Extract twice a week via a gastric tube. This extract, produced by Merck, contained proanthocyanidins. [GSPE] If the rats had been humans, they would have received a dose of 700 milligrams of Grape Seed Extract twice a week.
A third group of test animals received an injection of boldenone every week. Finally, a fourth group received both boldenone and Grape Seed Extract.
Results
The heart of the lab rats who had been given boldenone became heavier. And no, heart enlargement through steroids use is not favorable. The addition of Grape Seed Extract to boldenone treatment negated that effect.
The figure below shows how boldenone made the heart muscle bigger. If the left ventricle of the heart - the part of the heart muscle that pumps oxygen-rich blood into the body - had contracted, blood was still under pressure in the blood vessels of the test animals that had been given boldenone [Left].
This indicates that the heart hypertrophied because it had to work harder. And that again indicates that the blood vessels were not healthy.
Again, Grape Seed Extract negated this effect.
The figures below show what exactly happened to the blood vessels. Boldenone had activated NOX enzymes. NOX enzymes produce free radicals. Immune cells, but also the cells that make up blood vessels, produce NOX enzymes. These enzymes are useful when the body is fighting pathogens, but if these enzymes become active without good reason, they can stiffen and damage blood vessels.
NOX2 is produced by the enothelial cells in the walls of blood vessels, NOX4 in the heart muscle.
Click on the figure above for a larger version.
Conclusion
"These new insights into the antioxidative activity of grape seed proanthocyanidin extract should serve as a basis for the development of improved chemopreventive or therapeutic strategies for cardiac toxicity induced by boldenone", the reserchers write.
Doubts
The dose of boldenone that the Egyptians used was low: 5 milligrams per kilogram of body weight per week, they write. If that is not an editorial translation error, then the human equivalent of the dose that the researchers used is about 70 milligrams per week. Steroids users usually take 400-600 milligrams of boldenone a week, and some of them dare a gram per week.
Does Grape Seed Extract protect steroids users from cardiovascular side effects? We are not sure at all.
Source:
Oxid Med Cell Longev. 2018 Jul 5;2018:9434385.
More:
Biggest study on cardiovascular side effects of steroids brings bad news for users 28.07.2017
Thrombosis in the family? Careful with those steroids... 07.01.2016
Testosterone therapy can increase chance of heart attack 23.03.2014
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