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20.10.2011

Recovery from a Deca cycle can take up to a year

For chemical athletes who have taken a cycle of nandrolone decanoate, re-establishing their hormonal balance can take longer than you'd expect. Swedish researchers at the Karolinska Institutet discovered this when they tracked users for a number of months after they'd taken a steroids cycle.

Study
The researchers found most of their subjects through the Anti-Doping Hot-Line, a free telephone service in Sweden for steroids users. The researchers recruited a total of 21 men who had been taking nandrolone decanoate, and monitored them after they'd completed a course. The Swedes wrote that all test subjects had "a genuine desire to give up using anabolic steroids".

Results
Nandrolone decanoate is known as a steroid that doping hunters can detect longer after intake. All traces of nandrolone itself have disappeared out of the body 4-5 weeks after the last injection, but its metabolites, 19-norandrosterone and 19-noreticholanolone, keep on circulating for much, much longer. In their article, which will soon appear in the Journal of Steroid Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, the Swedes wonder whether this is why it takes steroids users longer to recover from the cycles of androgens they take.

Norandrosterone	Noreticholanolone

The figure below shows the concentration of 19-norandrosterone in the athletes' urine. After six months, 80 percent of the athletes still showed up positive when they did a doping test. After the six months, the researchers lost track of most of their subjects. After a year, the researchers only had data on four of the test subjects, but of those half still tested positive. If you take part in a sport where doping checks are standard, you're better off not using nandrolone decanoate.

The two figures above show the concentrations of LH and FSH in the athletes' blood. These hormones stimulate the production of testosterone in the testes. During the first four months there was a statistical correlation between the concentration of these messenger hormones in the blood and that of norandrosterone in the urine. By the way, you also see that the concentration of these hormones continued to rise for almost a year after stopping taking the steroids. That means that the body is recovering throughout this period.

PCT
The research doesn't mention post-cycle therapy, but reading between the lines you can make out that the subjects didn't take anti-oestrogenics compounds after stopping with the steroids.

Source:
J Steroid Biochem Mol Biol. 2011 Aug 22. [Epub ahead of print].

More:
Bodybuilder's hormones still off balance three years after last cycle 14.07.2011
Recovery from mild nandrolone use takes six months 13.12.2008