[Myocardial infarction and anabolic steroid use. A case report]

The potential cardiotoxicity of anabolic steroids is not well known. The authors report the case of a young man who was a top class body builder and who developed severe ischaemic cardiomyopathy presenting with an inferior wall myocardial infarction. The clinical history revealed prolonged and intensive usage of two types of anabolic steroids to be the only risk factor. This cardiotoxicity may be related to several physiopathological mechanisms: accelerated atherogenesis by lipid changes, increased platelet aggregation, coronary spasm or a direct toxic effect on the myocytes. The apparent scarcity of the reported clinical details in the literature is probably an underestimation of the consequences of this usage.