Naked Science Forum

Life Sciences => Physiology & Medicine => Topic started by: thedoc on 08/07/2014 17:57:10

Title: How can we catch athletes who dope?
Post by: thedoc on 08/07/2014 17:57:10

Cycling fans were devastated when Lance Armstrong was found guilty of systematic doping. But how can we prevent this in future?
Read a transcript of the interview by clicking here (http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/content/interviews/interview/1000780/)
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Title: Re: How can we catch athletes who dope?
Post by: CliffordK on 09/07/2014 04:09:34

Many substances could potentially be tested for by taking hair, toenail, or fingernail samples, which would give a much longer period of testing.  Say, if you could recover 6 months of data from a toenail scraping, then it would be harder to fool the tests.

Natural "steroids" are a problem, and much harder to test for.  Perhaps one could convince manufacturers to make ¹³C substituted testosterone, then come up with a test to screen for it.  However, that would undoubtedly significantly increase the manufacturing cost.  Such a substitution would likely have no effect on those individuals with legitimate use of the drug.  Of course, somewhere there would be a rogue manufacturer making human equivalent testosterone without the marker.

Title: Re: How can we catch athletes who dope?
Post by: David Cooper on 10/07/2014 18:16:59

The biggest problem is people competing with an inherited genetic advantage. If we could eliminate that, then the racing could be a lot more fair.