The Effects of EPO
Mykala recently commented about the doping substance EPO… and I started writing a comment in response. Unfortunately, the comment got so long that, well, it turned into a full post. I recently revisited a first-person account of EPO and other chemicals for enhancing human performance — we now join this comment already in progress…
Those blood test blots remind me of the DNA gels we ran in biochemistry lab. Very interesting stuff, how they try to detect this doping — though the fact that some of it is essentially undetectable is amazing. It looks likes there’s a significant problem with detection accuracy… or at least consistency.
So let’s see, we have antagonistic pollution and agonist EPO… perhaps the net effect will be, as they say, “a wash”! :)
Reminds me of an amazing article about a guy who, for the purposes of writing about it, tries (under the direction of a doctor) different growth hormones, steroids, etc. for half a year.
About EPO:
Also high on my list was that powerful stuff called erythropoietin, better known as EPO, a hormone that boosts oxygen levels in the blood by prompting the bone marrow to produce more red blood cells. EPO is known to have amazing endurance-boosting effects…
Another excerpt from the article:
EPO occurs naturally in the body, but only in tiny amounts. Researchers at Amgen Inc., a California pharmaceutical company, figured out how to synthesize it in quantities that could help people who weren’t producing enough red blood cells, like cancer patients suffering from anemia. EPO was also a gift from the gods for athletes looking to cheat. It was easy to administer—a clear liquid injected with simple shots—always effective, and, until recently, impossible to identify, because there was no chemical test to alert doctors to its presence.
The difficulties of detecting EPO finally drove anti-doping officials to decree that they would disqualify any athlete found with a red-blood-cell concentration—known as the hematocrit level—of more than 50 percent. (The hematocrit level for an ordinary, active person is between 34 and 46 percent.) Of course, the 50 percent mark only gave athletes a defined limit. You could use EPO to jack up your levels higher than that while training, and as long as you competed with a level of 49.9 percent, you’d be fine.
It wasn’t until the Sydney Olympics in 2000 that anti-doping experts, led by Françoise Lasne, a researcher at the French National Anti-Doping Laboratory, had come up with a method to distinguish the red blood cells produced by EPO from those produced naturally—enabling chemical detection of the drug. But each year, with new generations of drugs, cheating becomes more sophisticated, and EPO isn’t the only substance that boosts red-blood-cell production.
But there’s also human growth hormone:
If lower HGH levels hurt performance, the reasoning went, then higher levels would help it. And while there are sophisticated tests for steroids, there is still no means to detect HGH. It was so widely abused at the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta that athletes joked about renaming them “the Human Growth Hormone Olympics.”
And then it gets really interesting:
After a few weeks of the HGH, I began to notice subtle changes. My skin started getting… better. Sun blotches that I’d had on my arms for a year faded away. One morning I woke up and a scar on my forehead—which I’d gotten from a mountain-bike endo two years earlier—was more or less gone. Even though I was training like a madman, I looked more rested. Younger. A little fresher.
Then I started to realize that my eyesight really was improving. I’d been thinking about getting glasses to read fine print on maps, but now there was no need. The glasses I used for night driving stayed in the glove compartment, unused, unnecessary.
On taking EPO:
Despite these measurements, I remained skeptical about all the drugs until March 29, when I rode an event along the central coast of California, the Solvang Double Century, at what for me was a fast and hard pace, finishing in around 11.5 hours. About ten hours in, it dawned on me that something was definitely happening. Sure, I’d been training hard, but I’d done enough of that to know what to expect. All around me were riders—good, strong riders—who looked as worn out as you’d expect after ten hours in the saddle. I was tired, but I felt curiously strong, annoyingly talkative and fresh, eager to hammer the last 40 miles. The last time I’d ridden 200 miles, I felt awful the next day, like I’d been hit by a truck. After the Solvang race I woke up and felt hardly a touch of soreness. I also felt like I could easily ride another 200, and I realized that I’d entered another world, the realm of instant recovery. I’ll be frank: It was a reassuring kind of world, and I could see why people might want to stay there.
After this, things get crazy-dangerous what with anabolic steroids, etc. This entire anti-aging performance-enhancing world is crazy (like, batshit insane)… but reading this first-hand account really gives these acronyms some meaning.
