Patient (imported) wrote: Wed Aug 09, 2006 7:47 am
There is an article (
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 00960.html) by Ben Harder in the Health section of today's (8Aug06) Washington Post concerning Landis' allegedly excessive testosterone. There is a good bit of general info about T in the article as well as rather strong hints that Harder thinks someone administered a large dose of transdermal T to Landis before stage 17.
.
The Article:
Hormones As Dope
How Testosterone Pumps Up Performance
By Ben Harder
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, August 8, 2006; Page HE01
After repeated testing of a sample of Tour de France winner Floyd Landis's urine revealed apparent doping with testosterone, one detail seemed to seal the case: The sample suggesting there were artificially high levels of the hormone in his body was collected immediately after his stunning come-from-behind performance on the 17th stage of the 20-part race.
Clearly, the speculation was he'd juiced up right before the big ride.
A lot isn't known yet about what Landis took and when he took it. But a lot is understood about testosterone, the naturally occurring hormone that makes males men. And none of it suggests that it would have helped Landis much if he had binged on a synthetic form of the man-juice right before his comeback ride.
Testosterone's abilities to enhance performance when taken at high doses accrue gradually, so athletes who abuse it usually do so over an extended period, experts say. This stuff is not Popeye's spinach.
The conventional wisdom is that "you need a while for it to work," says Linn Goldberg, an internist at the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland and a spokesman for the Endocrine Society.
"I'm not familiar with [testosterone] being used effectively the day of an event, because it takes time to have an impact," says Gary I. Wadler, an internist at the New York University School of Medicine and a consultant to the World Anti-Doping Agency.
When taken over time, testosterone can confer a number of athletic advantages: increased muscle strength and size, improved bone strength and a higher count of red blood cells, which transport oxygen to demanding tissues. Taking the hormone regularly can also reduce muscle soreness after workouts, cutting recovery time, Goldberg says.
He and other experts note, however, that artificially inflated levels of testosterone have serious side effects and risks, including infertility, dangerous enlargement of the heart, prostate enlargement, balding, and acne. By boosting red-cell count, it may also trigger strokes. The hormone can produce psychological effects such as aggressiveness that, while adverse in most contexts, could aid competitive athletes under pressure to perform, says Wadler. But it's not known whether these mental changes happen fast enough to help an athlete immediately before competition.
"There's not really been a good study to show an acute response to a single dose," says endocrinologist Richard J. Auchus of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. "You can see manic responses in some people in just a few days, but it's not uniform from person to person."
Let's Go to the Glands
Testosterone is made primarily in the testes, which is why it's the trademark male sex hormone. (Women make smaller amounts in their ovaries and adrenal glands, and usually have about 5 percent as much testosterone as men do.)
The testes release numerous pulses of testosterone every day, and men's blood concentrations generally rise during the night and decline during the day, Auchus says. The hormone's level in urine reflects average blood levels during the period the urine was made. In men, levels change little from day to day or week to week, although they decline with age.
As the body makes testosterone, it also generates a biologically inactive byproduct called epitestosterone. Most people have about equal amounts of those two hormones.
Since synthetic preparations generally don't contain epitestosterone, a doping athlete's T:E ratio gets out of whack.
That's why authorities measure the T:E ratio to detect possible doping. For most men, the ratio of testosterone to epitestosterone is between 1:1 and 3:1, Auchus says. A ratio of 4:1 or higher triggers suspicion of doping.
It's possible to be higher than that cutoff without doping, but "if you naturally exceed it, you'd be naturally exceeding it all the time," Goldberg says. Several tests over a period of time would verify this.
Landis's ratio went from below 4:1 after the Tour's 15th stage to 11:1 two days later, according to the reported results of testing on a urine sample collected on the Tour's 17th stage, a 200-kilometer event that took place on July 20. Within a day or two, it was back below 4:1.
Why They Call It Dope
Yes, but couldn't Landis's heroic ride itself have produced the spike in the manly chemical? Or how about the beer and whiskey power drinks he says he indulged in the night before the 17th stage?
Unlikely. Few things other than use of testosterone or other anabolic steroids are known to boost levels or change the T:E ratio significantly, Auchus says. Landis's testosterone also contained isotopes of carbon that indicated it was not made in his body.
Brief periods of "vigorous exercise might bump up your testosterone a bit, and so might a high-protein diet," Goldberg says. The physical stress associated with prolonged, intense exercise might eventually lower a person's testosterone level. But in either case, these changes would be minimal, he said.
As for drinking alcohol, there is some evidence (at least in females) it may increase the T:E ratio slightly, Wadler says. "But that wouldn't bring it from below 4 to 11," he adds.
Some athletes "cycle" or "pyramid" their use of anabolic steroids such as testosterone, experts say. That is, they use illegal substances episodically during training and then taper off before anticipated testing, to clear the substance from their systems.
Other athletes may use testosterone gel or cream or even lozenges (because they absorb through the skin in the mouth) judiciously throughout training and competition, with the expectation that small amounts will provide benefits without knocking their T:E ratio too far out of line. Testosterone applied via gels and creams leaves the body more quickly than that coming from shots, which is why many athletes prefer the transdermal forms.
So how could such circumspect cheaters get burned by a urine test they are expecting? Taking testosterone through the skin has unpredictable results, Goldberg says. "You might have applied more, or just absorbed more of it than usual. You might be flying under the radar and then, boom, you hit" a detectable level, he says.
Could a bit of carelessness or an unexpected bodily response to synthetic testosterone have unmasked Landis's deception? That's a question that remains to be answered. ยท
; I believe that also it is the last Cycling tour of the European season. So it is a bit special.