Is steroid use up 645% over the last 3 years?
"Six-fold increase in steroid users, says charity"
BBC Newsbeat headline, 9 April 2014
The number of steroid users has hit the headlines today as official guidance to needle and syringe services from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) was updated to take steroid users into account.
The BBC and the Independent reported on figures from the charity Crime Reduction Initiatives (CRI), which showed the number of steroid users seen by its needle exchanges in England increased by 645% in 3 years. The charity has not said that it believes this to be the increase in steroid use, just visits to its exchanges by steroid users. And the increase in numbers is likely to be partly explained by a doubling in the number of exchanges it operated.
Official figures from the Home Office suggest that around 59,000 adults used anabolic steroids in 2012/13, and that usage has been increasing in the past few years (although not by six times).
There are potentially some issues with those figures, however. A 2010 report from a government advisory body found that while this data was the most comprehensive, it had "some limitations" when it comes to estimating steroid use. For example, because it's based on a survey of households it doesn't include halls of residence, and might not be good at getting responses from people who spend a lot of time out (for example at the gym).
More services on offer means more users
Needle and syringe exchange programmes provide users of drugs, including anabolic steroids, with sterile equipment to help prevent the spread of viruses and infections.
CRI says the number of steroid users visiting its needle exchanges went up from 290 to 2,161 between 2010 and 2013, an increase of 645%.
But this doesn't mean that the number of steroid users in the UK has risen by the same proportion. CRI told us that over the same period the number of exchanges it ran doubled. That means it's likely that some of the rise in visitors is being driven by the increased availability of the service rather than an increase in the underlying demand.
Other factors could also be at play. Steroid users might be more likely to visit because there is greater awareness of the risks, for example.
Steroid use is on the rise
The Home Office figures show that 0.2% of 16- to 59-year-olds reported using anabolic steroids in 2012/13. This was an increase from 0.1% a decade earlier. While these numbers seem small, the Home Office reports that the increase was statistically significant.
This piece originally quoted British Crime Survey figures from the Home Office. A reader has since pointed us to a report from the Government's Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs which discusses concerns about the data. We've now included these caveats to our piece.
We also removed a reference to figures from 1996, as the same report makes clear that a change to the wording of the survey question in 2000 means earlier figures are not directly comparable to current ones.