Hearing news about a professional sportsmen or celebrity using steroids for attaining lean muscle mass and staying ahead of the competition is nothing new.
The changing times and popularity of steroids has clearly suggested that sporting events and stardom is living under a dark cloud of steroids despite claims from doping officials that much has been done by them to curb the use of steroids.
One really feels that almost every one was into steroids until steroid testing protocols were introduced.
From SteroidTimes.com:
In a recent study done by Strahm et al at the Swiss Laboratory for Doping Analyses not very reliable (1). They examined the T/E ratio and its variances between ethnic groups because of a testosterone over epitestosterone (T/E) ratio exceeding 4.0 is considered as suspicious of testosterone administration, irrespectively of individual heterogeneous factors such as the athlete’s ethnicity. Strahm and colleagues found that a deletion polymorphism in the UGT2B17 gene was demonstrated to account for a significant part of the inter-individual variability in the T/E between Caucasians and Asians. By estimation of the prevalence of the UGT2B17 deletion/deletion genotype (African: 22%; Asian: 81%; Caucasian: 10%; Hispanic: 7%), ethnic-specific thresholds were developed for a specificity of 99% for the T/E (African: 5.6; Asian: 3.8; Caucasian: 5.7; Hispanic: 5.8).
In other words the group at the Swiss doping lab found out that a blanket T/E ratio is not accurate enough for the testing protocol and that “significant differences have been observed between all ethnic groups.” There conclusion was “that an athlete’s endocrinological passport consisting of a longitudinal follow-up together with the ethnicity and/or the genotype would strongly enhance the detection of testosterone abuse.”
It can easily be said that it is high time that steroids should either be allowed or banned as a middle path just do not seem to work.
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