Genetics and Doping in Cycling and Sports

Given the recent controversy over the use of steroids and performance enhancing drugs, I felt an overview of performance enhancing drugs and their impact on athletes -- especially women -- was in order.

Women and Strength Performance

I have found that women have the same biological ability to develop strength and power as men when subjected to high quality training. What works for the male athlete works equally for the female athlete.

However, the degree to which a woman athlete can develop muscle mass and strength is dependent upon a number of factors. These include: heredity, body type, diet, the level of adrenal androgen (testosterone) secretion, and the type and intensity of a strength training program.

Women manufacture about one seventh the amount of testosterone that men do. After puberty, a woman begins to produce a constant, adult level of testosterone, and the production is split about 50:50 between the ovaries and adrenal glands. After menopause, testosterone production drops much further. Studies have shown that testosterone helps to maintain muscle and bone, and higher testosterone levels increase energy and aggression in both women and men.

Performance Enhancing Drugs in Cycling

According to sports historians, the use of drugs to increase performance in athletics appears to have been routine by the post-World War II era. At the Olympic level, abuse was rampant, and it wasn't until the 1968 Summer Games in Mexico City that any rudimentary drug testing was enforced.

Though it has been more common for men to use performance enhancing drugs in cycling, women have used them as well. They include: anabolic steroids, growth hormones, testosterone, and EPO, which have all been used to increase strength, and to shorten an athlete's recovery time by repairing muscle cells faster. Drug testing is enforced in the Olympics, Tour de France, and in National and International Cycling events, however, the penalties and drug testing vary wildly. Moreover, the types of drugs are varied.

To give a brief background of each drug, anabolic steroids were developed in the 1930's, and were used to treat diseases in males whose bodies did not produce enough testosterone. These drugs are also used for conditions such as rare types of anemia and kidney disease. Many new anabolic steroids have been created by changing the way chemicals were put together so certain effects were stronger.

EPO is a genetically-engineered version of a natural hormone made by the kidney that stimulates bone marrow to make red blood cells. Synthetic EPO is sold as a rescue medicine for treating anemia in endstage kidney disease, when the production of EPO declines.

Because red blood cells carry oxygen to the muscles, and cyclists need a large amount of oxygen during their sport, raising the number of red blood cells improves performance.

In the past, bike racers have also tried to increase the number of red blood cells by removing their own blood, storing it, and transfusing it back just before a race. Nowadays, this process of "blood doping" has been replaced by genetic engineering. Athletes can simply inject EPO, which causes the body to make the cells.

Since EPO is a naturally occurring hormone, testing for it exclusively is difficult. Unable to measure EPO itself, the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) rely on a surrogate test that measures the density of cells in the blood. A bike racers blood on average has a cellular content of 43- 47 percent, so the UCI decreed that anyone with a level above 50 percent would be disqualified for taking EPO. Detecting EPO is also tricky, since training at high altitude also increases the number of red blood cells.

Growth hormones (HGH) stimulate the growth of bones and muscle, and like EPO, cannot be reliably detected in abusers. Testosterone also urges the RNA, or message center, in muscle cells to create more protein, and hence more muscles. For most women and men, testosterone production peaks in their twenties and slowly declines.

Genetic Enhancement

More recently, "gene doping" has been added to the list of banned substances in athletics.

In a meeting for the American Association of Science, Lee Sweeney of the University of Pennsylvania has found ways to increase muscle mass, strength, and endurance by injections of a gene-manipulated virus that he tested on rats.

The virus goes to the muscle tissue, and causes a rapid growth of cells, causing the muscle to grow in size and strength by 15 to 30 percent. When the technique was used on rats that were also put through an exercise program, the animals doubled their muscle strength.

Sweeney said, "If a normal person were to inject this, their muscles would get stronger without them doing anything. If they are athletes in training, the rat study indicates that their training would be much more effective, injury would be overcome more easily, and the effect of the training would last a much longer time."

Sweeney also said that already half of the e-mails he received are from athletes or sports trainers. And unlike performance enhancing drugs, the gene therapy cannot be detected by blood or urine tests. Testing would require a biopsy by a sophisticated DNA laboratory to detect the use of gene therapy in an athlete.

Dick Pound of McGill University and the World Anti-Doping Agency, which controls doping in athletics, said the sports community lost control of drugs for performance enhancement in the 1960's to 1990's, and "we've been playing catch-up ever since."

Gene therapy and performance enhancing drugs betray the very essence of sport, and it should be that athletes use their natural genetics, talents, and training to compete. But widespread use and disemination of drug products has changed the nature of sport as we know it.

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