Adolescence and doping

The desire to win sports competitions or obsession with achieving the perfect body structure has made some adolescents and children vulnerable to taking substances and use of methods prohibited in sports. In our review, we refer to most of the research in the field of doping that narrowly concerns adolescents as a vulnerable group. In our search of the literature, we used the free search engine PubMed. The search was made in all fields based on the MeSH thesaurus; adolescent *, doping, sport *, youth drug abuse in sport using the Boolean operator AND. Based on the aforementioned MeSH thesaurus, using the Boolean operator AND, the Pubmed search engine offered more than 500 results. Careful reading of abstracts and full papers with a defined topic of interest for discussion included 41 papers. In conclusion, it is an indisputable fact that illicit substances adversely affect adolescent health, growth and development. Despite development of the policies and strategies of developed countries in the fight against doping, the results clearly indicate that education, prevention, prohibition and testing programs on substances and methods prohibited in sports still need to be intensified. Key words: adolescent; doping in sports

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