Article on hair testing of athletes to detect use of testosterone undecanoate.

The most abused substance in sports testing is testosterone, an anabolic steroid that has been on the International Olympic Committee's list of banned substances for many years. It is regularly found in urines tested in official labs accredited by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), despite the best efforts of sportsmen and sportswomen to disguise their actions.

In practice, testosterone itself is not the drug taken, because it is metabolised rapidly to inactive compounds. The preferred alternatives are testosterone esters, which metabolise slowly to testosterone, providing a more gradual release of the steroid into the system. For drug testing labs looking for testosterone esters during the routine testing of urine samples, the focus is on the metabolite testosterone, because the esters are not detectable in urine.

In order to distinguish the drug from natural testosterone, the ratio of testosterone to epitestosterone, a second natural steroid, is measured, although the proximity of the ratios from natural and abused testosterone has caused problems in the past. It would be far preferable to measure the intact testosterone esters.

The esters have been found in blood plasma but a less invasive matrix for collection would be hair, and this has been investigated by scientists in Belgium.

Hair testing of athletes has the bonus that it will be far more difficult to falsify samples, as occurs with urine testing. It would be very difficult for an athlete to refuse permission for an official to remove a few hairs from their head on the basis of privacy. On the other hand, head shaving could be an avoidance technique, so the method would need to be tested on other body hair.

If you pluck all head and body hair in the period before competing, rather than simply shaving, you'd be hairless for longer and have a better chance of testing negative :-)

No comments:

Post a Comment