November Featured Author

Harrison G. Pope, Jr., MD, MPh
Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School
Chief of the Biological Psychiatry Laboratory, McLean Hospital
Boston, Massachusetts

From the November Issue: Ruptured Tendons in Anabolic-Androgenic Steroid Users: A Cross-Sectional Cohort Study

Podcast: Listen to Dr. Pope discuss his article in the November issue.

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Dr. Harrison G. Pope, Jr. is a Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, USA and Chief of the Biological Psychiatry Laboratory at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts.  After graduating from Harvard Medical School in 1974, Dr. Pope began his residency training at McLean Hospital, and has remained there ever since, both as a clinician treating psychiatric disorders and as a researcher in clinical psychiatry.

Dr. Pope has authored more than 300 peer-reviewed papers on a wide range of topics in psychiatry, including the diagnosis and treatment of psychotic disorders, major mood disorders, anxiety disorders, and eating disorders. Starting in the 1990s, he began to focus increasingly on substance use disorders and has published extensively on the effects of cannabis, hallucinogens, ecstasy, and especially anabolic-androgenic steroids (AAS). In 2003 Dr. Pope was named by the Institute for Scientific Information as one of the world’s most widely cited psychiatrists/psychologists and also as one of the most widely cited neuroscientists.

Dr. Pope has been an avid weightlifter for more than 35 years, and thus has had much first-hand contact with AAS users. He began research in this area in the 1980s, and has now published more than 40 papers on AAS use and related topics. These papers have encompassed the psychiatric effects of AAS, the association of AAS use with male body image disorders, studies of the epidemiology of AAS use, and studies of the neuropsychiatric and medical consequences of long-term AAS exposure. In a recent five-year study funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, he has examined cardiovascular function in long-term AAS users as compared to groups of non-AAS-using weightlifters and non-weightlifters. This study, now in the phase of data analysis, has also generated new insights into the effects of AAS on other organ systems. Among these was the observation that AAS users displayed a strikingly high prevalence of tendon ruptures – leading to the analysis that produced the present paper.

Selected Other Published Work

Kanayama G, Hudson JI, Pope HG Jr. Long-term psychiatric and medical effects of anabolic-androgenic steroids: A looming public health concern? Drug Alcohol Depend 2008;98:1-12.  PMCID2646607

Kanayama G, Hudson JI, Pope HG Jr.  Features of men with anabolic-androgenic steroid dependence: a comparison with nondependent AAS users and with AAS nonusers.  Drug Alcohol Depend 2009;102:130-7.  PMCID2694450.

Kanayama G, Brower KJ, Wood RI, Hudson JI, Pope HG Jr. Anabolic-androgenic steroid dependence: an emerging disorder.  Addiction 2009;104:1966-78. PMCID2780436.

Kanayama G, Brower KJ, Wood RI, Hudson JI, Pope HG Jr.  Treatment of anabolic-androgenic steroid dependence:  emerging evidence and its implications.  Drug Alcohol Depend 2010;109:6-13.  PMCID2875348

Baggish AL, Weiner RB, Kanayama G, Hudson JI, Picard MH, Hutter AM, Pope HG.  Long-term anabolic-androgenic steroid use is associated with left ventricular dysfunction.  Circ Heart Fail 2010;3:472-6. PMCID2909423

Pope HG Jr, Wood R, Rogol A, Nyberg F, Bowers L, Bhasin S. Adverse health consequences of the use of performance-enhancing drugs: an Endocrine Society Scientific Statement. Endocrine Reviews. 2014; 35: 341-375. PMCID 4026349

Kanayama G, Hudson JI, DeLuca J, Isaacs S, Baggish A, Weiner R, Bhasin S, Pope HG Jr. Prolonged hypogonadism in males following withdrawal from anabolic-androgenic steroids: an underrecognized problem. Addiction. 2015;110:823-831. NIHMSID 657639