Annual banned‐substance review: Analytical approaches in human sports drug testing 2019/2020

Abstract

Analytical chemistry-based research in sports drug testing has been a dynamic endeavor for several decades, with technology-driven innovations continuously contributing to significant improvements in various regards including analytical sensitivity, comprehensiveness of target analytes, differentiation of natural/ endogenous substances from structurally identical but synthetically derived compounds, assessment of alternative matrices for doping control purposes, and so forth. The resulting breadth of tools being investigated and developed by anti-doping researchers has allowed to substantially improve anti-doping programs and data interpretation in general. Additionally, these outcomes have been an extremely valuable pledge for routine doping controls during the unprecedented global health crisis that severely affected established sports drug testing strategies. In this edition of the annual banned-substance review, literature on recent developments in antidoping published between October 2019 and September 2020 is summarized and discussed, particularly focusing on human doping controls and potential applications of new testing strategies to substances and methods of doping specified the World Anti-Doping Agency's 2020 Prohibited List.

Ultrasensitive Detection of Human Chorionic Gonadotropin Using Frequency Locked Microtoroid Optical Resonators

“…It is used by athletes to increase the secretion of testosterone and is on the World Anti-Doping Association (WADA)'s list of prohibited substances for male athletes. 9 The smallest detectable quantity of hCG by mass spectrometry is approximately 2 pM 8 , which is only slightly below the current doping threshold of 13 pM that has been imposed by WADA 10 . Based on the concentration of hCG measured in baseline samples of healthy male urine, it has been recommended to reduce the doping threshold further to ~ 2.4 pM in order to avoid false negative results in doping tests 2,5 .…”

Sports drug testing and the athletes' exposome

“…Protecting athletes from consequences due to inadvertent doping has become particularly challenging, especially when considering the required and continuously improving analytical sensitivity of antidoping testing procedures 94 . Investigations into the athlete's exposome and how to distinguish between deliberate drug use and different contamination scenarios has become a central topic of antidoping research, and although it might appear as counterintuitive at first glance, increasing the testing frequency of athletes seems to be a particularly useful approach in support of the differentiation of low (lowest) level drug exposure from applications of pharmacologically relevant doses of doping agents 95 .…”

Do dried blood spots have the potential to support result management processes in routine sports drug testing?—Part 2: Proactive sampling for follow‐up investigations concerning atypical or adverse analytical findings

“…Anti‐doping laboratories aim at sustainably optimizing and refining test methods to accommodate the constantly increasing demands in routine doping controls, particularly concerning analytical sensitivity and, accordingly, retrospectivity 1 especially for substances prohibited at‐all‐times as documented in the World Anti‐Doping Agency's (WADA's) prohibited list 2 . The considerable advances in knowledge concerning drug metabolism and renal elimination 3–6 combined with substantial improvements in analytical instrumentation have allowed for lowering detection limits to sub nanograms per milliliter levels for numerous urinary target analytes over the past decade.…”