Blood Transfusions - if you store and use your own blood

[gpsblake]

Can they detect it? It seems to me that if I were going to cheat, I would store up my own blood a few weeks prior, then have someone transfuse it into me during the tour.

[Helmet Head]

Can they detect it? It seems to me that if I were going to cheat, I would store up my own blood a few weeks prior, then have someone transfuse it into me during the tour.
It's called autologous blood doping and there is no test for it, other than it is yet another method (like EPO and homologous blood doping) that raises hematocrit blood levels, which are only allowed to a certain threshold. But there may be ways to temporarily raise your white blood cell count to make the ratio drop.

The other problem is that you can only "donate" and store so much blood, and it has a very limited (30 days?) shelf life.

Some people speculate that these limitations on autologous blood doping explains why some racers really limit the number of races they enter per season...

[vic32amg]

"Every second counts"

[urodacus]

It's called autologous blood doping and there is no test for it, other than it is yet another method (like EPO and homologous blood doping) that raises hematocrit blood levels, which are only allowed to a certain threshold. But there may be ways to temporarily raise your white blood cell count to make the ratio drop.


incorrect! well, partly. if you need a lesson, read on. if not, go to the next post please.

your haematocrit is the percentage of your whole blood volume that is composed of red blood cells. normal men have a crit of about 43% up to maybe 47% or so, a bit higher if dehydrated. women are a tad lower. you measure it by taking a blood sample and spinning it in a centrifuge for a couple of minutes to force the RBC to the bottom of the tube, and then use a ruler to check the height of the red blood cell fraction. Haematocrit is also called the packed cell volume (PCV).

increasing WBC count does NOT affect your crit, as WBC are usually a very small percentage of your whole blood volume (1% or less) unless you have some kinds of leukaemia, in which case you're not going to be in a race. anyway, raising your WBC count would make your blood carry LESS oxygen (by virtue of excluding RBC from the same space) so it's not a good option.

homologous blood doping (transfusing someone else's type A+ blood into you if you're a Type A+ too) is easily caught by checking for unique self-recognition antigens on the surface of RBCs. no person has the same combination of these antigens as you, except your clone (ie your identical twin). autologous doping is much harder to detect, and can only be seen by its effect on haematocrit, unless you do some really time consuming checks like looking for the age or percentage of reticulocytes (circulating nucleated newly released RBCs, normally 05-1.5%) or similar obscure tests. not feasible for most teams as the equipment is expensive and complicated. you can also momnitor the actual amount of the protein haemoglobin that actually carries the oxygen around in the bolood. haemoglobin is densely packed into RBCs which act as carrier bags for the stuff and keep it packaged up so it has far less osmotic effects on the blood, sothe haematocrit and the Hg reading are very comparable. .

the UCI now uses a funky combination of both the haematocrit and the reticulocyte reading, called the off-score, to monitor both aspects of autologous blood doping. for a good discussion about Tyler Hamilton's example, see cycling news 2005 http://www.cyclingnews.com/news.php?id=features/2005/hamilton_appeal

EPO is a hormone that your body uses to signal to the bone marrow to serve up another batch of RBCs, and it is normally presnt in a very narrow concentration range. modern ttests look for EPO levels outside that range, and can also check (by isotope analysis, but with increasing difficulty as time passes from you taking it) to see if the EPO was manufactured in a lab or elsewhere outside the body, or if it's EPO from another species of animal.

haematocrit levels above 50 (i think the UCI cut off is also 50% but am not sure) when the RBC become too numerous to flow at the correct viscosity through capillaries can give rise to all kinds of problems with the circulation, impaired kidney filtration, disseminated blood clotting, venous thrombosis, etc, which are all potentially fatal, and are all made worse by dehydration... which is quite common in cycling races in mountains on hot days. some groups of people like Sherpas from Nepal and Tibet have much higher haematocits of around 60% but have other adaptations to deal with this.

altitude training or living can raise RBC levels too, as with racers such as Soler, as can sleeping in a low pressure tent, a la Lance. this is an example of endogenous EPO doping (ie, inducing the body to make more of its own EPO to stimulate more RBC production).

heterologous blood doping is getting blood from another species, but that's quite silly. and there are some artificial non-blood products that can raise the oxygen carrying capacity of your blood, but are generally not as good as RBCs themselves, and are more of an option in trauma surgery when people have lost a lot of blood. ask DrPete about that.

i think that may be all for lesson number two.

[mcoomer]

Alright Mr Smarty Guy...but why is the sky blue and the grass green? Answer me that! (kidding, kidding)

[daytonian]

http://www.cuttingedgemuscle.com/Forum/forumdisplay.php?daysprune=&forumid=9

on endurance forums, epo is used ALOT. These guys don't beat around any bushes. Mostly cyclists, tri's and swimmers.

[merlinextraligh]

Problem with autologous blood doping is just don't get enough pop from it. You lose some fitness and ability to train hard when you take it out, and shelf life limits how far in advance yo can do it.

Now combine out of competition EPO use with autologous blood doping and you're on to something.

Boost with EPO, Take blood out. Scrub blood for EPO markers (ala Dr Fuentes). Recover with EPO.

Infuse blood in competition.

It's this regime that gives an incentive to go disappear in the Mountains for a few week, avoiding testing.

[maddyfish]

So if you had an identical twin, and were a top level racer, you might have a significant advantage? By using him as a blood factory?

[DocRay]

incorrect! well, partly. if you need a lesson, read on. if not, go to the next post please.


Dude...this is an American forum, accuracy is not as important as sounding accurate.

FYI, the normal range of hematocrit is 42-47% for most sports.
Amazingly, it's 47-50% for cycling. Armstrong never scored below 48%.

Riis scored 60%, but never tested positive for EPO.