Guan Wang, Jérôme Durussel, Jonathan Shurlock, Martin Mooses, Noriyuki Fuku, Georgie Bruinvels, Charles Pedlar, Richard Burden, Andrew Murray, Brendan Yee, Anne Keenan, John D McClure, Pierre-Edouard Sottas, Yannis P Pitsiladis
BACKGROUND: Recombinant human erythropoietin (rHuEpo) can improve human performance and is therefore frequently abused by athletes. As a result, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) introduced the Athlete Biological Passport (ABP) as an indirect method to detect blood doping. Despite this progress, challenges remain to detect blood manipulations such as the use of microdoses of rHuEpo. METHODS: Forty-five whole-blood transcriptional markers of rHuEpo previously derived from a high-dose rHuEpo administration trial were used to assess whether microdoses of rHuEpo could be detected in 14 trained subjects and whether these markers may be confounded by exercise (n = 14 trained subjects) and altitude training (n = 21 elite runners and n = 4 elite rowers, respectively)...
November 14, 2017: BMC Genomics