Anabolic steroids have been used to treat lower extremity ulcerations, including venous and cryofibrinogenemic ulcers and lipodermatosclerosis (LDS). Yet there have been no studies to determine the severity and reversibility of side effects of anabolic steroids on liver enzymes and lipid profiles in elderly patients. We therefore evaluated, in a prospective, randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled trial, the extent and reversibility of abnormal liver enzymes and lipid profiles in patients with LDS and venous leg ulcers treated with stanozolol at 2 mg twice daily for up to 6 months. Follow-up laboratory testing was done for 2 months after cessation of treatment. A total of 44 patients with LDS and venous ulcers were enrolled and treated with either leg compression alone (placebo) or leg compression plus oral stanozolol 2 mg twice daily (active). Baseline and follow-up laboratory testing of liver enzymes and lipid profiles were obtained. A total of 21 active and 23 placebo patients were treated and evaluated. We measured liver enzymes (aspartate aminotransferase [AST/SGOT], alanine aminotransferase [ALT/SGPT], γ-glutamyl transferase [GGT]) and lipid profile components (high-density lipoprotein [HDL], low-density lipoprotein [LDL], total cholesterol) before, during, and after the treatment period. We found that AST/SGOT and ALT/SGPT became significantly elevated in 29% (P = .0415 at 2 months) and 33% (P = .0182 at 1 month) of patients treated with stanozolol or placebo, respectively, with return to baseline in the posttreatment period. Unexpectedly, 91% of patients on stanozolol developed a significant (P < .0001) decrease in HDL levels, by as much as 37 U/L. All patients remained asymptomatic and levels returned to baseline after discontinuation of the drug. We conclude that low-dose stanozolol, 2 mg twice daily, produces asymptomatic and temporary elevation of liver transaminases and depression of the HDL level in a significant proportion of patients.

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As an introduction to the special issue of positions: asia critique on the unending Korean War, this opening essay calls critical attention to the war's temporal contours, shifting focus from the question of the Korean War's origins that bedeviled Korean studies throughout the Cold War to the unsettling question of why the Korean War, in our ostensibly post–Cold War moment, is still not over. This introduction highlights how the image-essays, critical analyses, and interview assembled in this issue, in challenging the war's standard 1950–53 periodization, examine the war's persistence in multiple, often overlooked modalities that call for critical and innovative interpretive practice. Against the fog of received historiography on the Korean War, the essays in this collection, by variously questioning the integrity of state-sponsored accounts of the “truth” of the war, call much-needed attention to the Korean War's legacies, its undertheorized afterlives, and its oblique yet telling ongoing manifestations.

Reading North Korean defector memoirs and Korean American “roots” narratives as forms of “second culture” relative to North Korea, namely, an alternative US-oriented culture whose representational authority is held as exceeding that of the socialist state of origin, this essay examines the ongoing Korean War as the backdrop for the neoconservative emergence of human rights critique of North Korea. Examining the transnational funding matrix behind the publication and international circulation of the North Korean defector memoir, specifically the National Endowment for Democracy's role in sponsoring such “human rights” writings, this essay reads the latter as weaponized forms of expression, defined by their instrumentality within an uneven global landscape of power and rendered lethal by the state of unresolved hostilities between the United States and North Korea. Positing the illegitimacy of North Korea, the defector memoir has been marshaled toward sovereignty-challenging, or regime-change, ends. Widely read as “human rights” literary forms, the defector memoir, alongside the Korean American “roots” narrative of North Korea, this essay argues, have served in the geopolitical arena as vehicles for “dissident” North Korean voices in place of an extant samizdat literature.