Green tea may cloud doping tests
- Post 07 April 2012
- By PressTV
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Doping officials may tighten tests on London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games after a study showed green tea might hide testosterone abuse.
Testosterone is one of the oldest hormones illegally used by athletes to build up muscle and improve records.
Athletes taking testosterone for doping purposes typically have 200 to 300 percent more of the hormone in their bodies than normal.
New findings, however, suggest that taking green tea may significantly reduce the hormone’s urine excretion, which is the source for detecting doping cases.
According to Declan Naughton and colleagues at Kingston University London, a group of green tea and white tea compounds called catechins inhibit an enzyme which attaches glucuronic acid to testosterone, making it more likely to be excreted in urine.
Although the phenomenon has just been studied in lab plates and rodents, the finding has raised much concern among doping officials on the eve of this summer’s Olympic Games.
“It’s interesting that something as common as tea could have a significant influence on the steroid profile,” said scientific director of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) Olivier Rabin.
“We may need to adjust our steroid (test) to allow us to exclude whether a test is modified by food or training or disease, before we can say that it’s doping,’’ Rabin added.
He suggested that officials may have to raise the normal threshold for what is considered a legal amount of testosterone to allow for any such interference.
Some scientists believe that the limited effects of foods like green tea on masking illegal drug use would be too small to help doping athletes.
“It would be a very foolish athlete who's thinking of doping with testosterone and thinks he could drink white or green tea to beat a drug test and I personally wouldn't want to drink nine cups of tea on the day of a race,” said Andrew Kicman of the Drug Control Centre at King's College London, which is providing the anti-doping laboratory for the upcoming Olympics.
Other experts like Charles Yesalis of Pennsylvania State University believe that officials need to react quickly.
“Athletes will not wait for the clinical trials,” Yesalis said. “I’ll bet there are already lots of athletes out there drinking loads of green tea.”
SJM/TE
Source: PressTV
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