New Trends of Doping in Sport

Drugs are designed and developed for medical purposes and they are intended to be beneficial to the human physiological system. However, it is well recognized that drugs could have unwanted side effects which could sometimes be harmful to the patient's health. Therefore, regulatory authorities all over the world insist on sophisticated and strict scientific and clinical assessment of any drug introduced for medical uses. However, the competitive nature of sport sometimes encourages the athletes to use drugs illicitly with the intention of producing an unfair advantage over their rivals but in these cases, no detailed studies are conducted to assess the benefits and dangers of such application of drugs. It is thus a necessity to control the misuse of drugs in sport, currently referred to as doping. The first action in this regard was taken in 1967 by International Olympic Committees (IOC), by publishing the list of banned substances and methods which comprised five groups: sympathomimetic amines, stimulants of CNS, narcotic analgesics, anti-depressants and major tranquillizers. Anti-depressants and major tranquillizers were removed from the list one year later. In 1976, after the winter Olympic games in Innsbruk, anabolic steroids were added to the list. In 1984 the use of exogenous testosterone was controlled, based on a test that measured the ratio of testosterone and epitestosterone levels in urine. Not only the use of prohibited substances were controlled, but the use of pharmacological, chemical and physical manipulations were also controlled in 1988 after it was revealed that probenecid was effective in reducing the urine concentration of many anabolic steroids. At the same time the use of diuretics and blood transfusions were prohibited. The next major change was in 1989 when the use of a number of hormones was banned including human chorionic gonadotropiroin (HCG), ACTH and human growth hormone (hGH). Erytropoietin (EPO) was added to the list of prohibited substances in 1990. In 1999, the IOC held an international conference on doping and the outcome was the formation of the world Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), an organization which is supported by both sport and governmental authorities. WADA published its first list of prohibited substances in 2004 and it continues to do so on a yearly basis. Adding new compounds or new class of compounds to the prohibited list is a rather complex process based on careful monitoring of the reports by WADA-accredited laboratories and consulting with independent research groups all over the …