Enhanced Games Tests Steroids As Demographic Fix

The Enhanced Games is proposing an audacious idea for aging economies: Inject yourself with performance-enhancing drugs when you are young as a way of extending your working life. The upstart competition, which openly allows banned substances — several of the inaugural combatants this weekend have received one or more drug suspensions in mainstream sports — is more than a battle of freakiness; its founders are trying to build a telehealth business around hormone protocols and say that spun-up athletes can be the billboard for a graying world’s labor problem.

What the Enhanced Games Are Selling to the Public

Co-founder Aron D’Souza casts the arena as a marketing engine for a high-margin longevity service, similar to direct-to-consumer platforms that dispense testosterone, growth hormone, and other compounds under medical supervision. With backing from leading tech investors and luring star athletes with seven-figure prizes for records shattered, the enterprise argues that the same “protocols” — perhaps drugs, maybe a sugary drink, or something in between — that make 30- and 40-somethings winners could ease millions into working longer, rebounding faster, and aging better.

It’s a Red Bull playbook with a biotech spin: Hyper performance to promote an underlying product. The product here is regulated medicine with real risks, contested benefits, and a history of controversy in sport.

The Demography of the Pitch Driving This Proposal

The macro story is indisputable. The United Nations projects fertility around the world has been settling at about 2.3 births per woman in recent years, less than replacement levels in most of the world outside of sub-Saharan Africa, while median ages rise. OECD projections have old-age dependency ratios spiking by midcentury, which would imply fewer workers supporting more retirees — not enough to bury us with them, but close.

That leaves governments with three levers: higher fertility, more immigration, and longer working lives. Pronatalist subsidies have produced modest and sometimes short-lived bumps in births in countries such as France and Hungary, while immigration is facing political headwinds. That, then, leaves healthy longevity — compressing morbidity, extending peak function — as a key economic variable.

What Science Says About Steroids And Longevity

This is where the Enhanced Games narrative clashes with the record. Clinical endocrinology backs testosterone replacement for men who are diagnosed with hypogonadism, which can help build muscle mass, increase bone density and libido — outside of that group the benefits are less clear, and the risks range from cardiovascular events to infertility to prostate health problems, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Endocrine Society.

Growth hormone in older people leads to more lean mass but has minimal functional benefit and many adverse effects — edema, joint pain, insulin resistance — per a meta-analysis in the Annals of Internal Medicine and guidance from the Endocrine Society. Abuse of anabolic-androgenic steroids at supraphysiologic doses has been associated in observational studies with cardiomyopathy, arrhythmias, thrombosis, liver toxicity, and mood disorders; Scandinavian registry research additionally links confirmed users to elevated all-cause mortality.

And none of these agents have been shown to prolong life in healthy adults. The World Health Organization’s healthy aging agenda instead directs attention to upstream interventions — physical activity, blood pressure control, diabetes treatment, smoking cessation and fall prevention — that yield strong function and years-of-life dividends.

From the Doping Stage to a Telehealth Clinic Model

The business vision is wholesale telemedicine: screening, labs, prescriptions, and follow-up care packaged in record-shattering performances. PitchBook and other trackers put the total at about $8.5 billion from longevity companies in 2024, showing investor appetite for products that purport to slow biological aging or extend healthspan.

Yet regulatory friction is real. Testosterone is a Schedule III controlled drug in the U.S., requiring careful prescribing and monitoring; growth hormone is very tightly regulated. Post-pandemic, the rules on telehealth and controlled drugs are getting more restrictive, and medical boards are taking aim at “lifestyle” hormone clinics. Internationally, the rules are very disparate, complicating a worldwide rollout.

Sports Integrity Versus Public Health in Enhancement

The Enhanced Games was specifically designed to reject the International Olympic Committee and World Anti-Doping Agency’s banned substances lists, claiming that conventional rules impede human development. History is cautionary: Government-backed doping programs in the former East Germany have left athletes with long-term health woes, and modern bodybuilding has been plagued by a string of early deaths that researchers trace to heavy use of anabolics.

Public health experts warn of signaling danger. Making drug-enhanced peak performance the mission of a medical profession dedicated to punishing those who refuse to make it their religion will push healthy people toward pharmacology instead of encouraging them in the healthier directions. The National Academies have consistently highlighted long-term data deficits for many enhancement drugs other than in certain narrow areas of medical use.

Will Augmentation Reduce the Shortage of Workers?

And even if hormone protocols are found safe and effective in expanding the productive years for some people, they still cannot erase the arithmetic of shrinking cohorts. An extra 1 percent of healthy working life across an economy is beneficial to GDP, but it is not a substitute for the loss of 20 percent of new entrants into a labor market. IMF and McKinsey economists focus on a portfolio approach: selective immigration, increased labor-force participation, later retirement, upskilling programs, and productivity-enhancing technology.

Where enhancement sensibly belongs is in clinical, evidence-based healthy aging — curing actual deficiencies, preventing sarcopenia with supervised strength programs, and using diagnostic tools to tailor prevention to the individual. That is a different beast from displaying world records to hawk mass-market hormone stacks.

The Equity and Access Issue in Enhancement and Care

The diffusion story is uncertain. The best telehealth services will always reach the people who can pay for them first: the most affluent and earliest of adopters, which could actually further open health and wage disparities if those improvements do have real benefit. Without insurance coverage, clear guardrails, and transparent reporting of results, the risk is that we have a two-tier system where wealthy people “age better” and everyone else ages more rapidly.

Bottom line: the Enhanced Games has hit on a legitimate demographic anxiety and an investable narrative. But steroids and hormones are at best a narrow medical tool — not a population policy. If the objective is population stability in aging societies, the evidence to date still favors fundamentals over pharmacology.