Abstract
AbstractThe athlete biological passport (ABP) is an established means for longitudinal monitoring of selected individual biomarkers of an athlete to obtain indirect but potentially long-term indications of the use of substances or methods prohibited in sport. Along the change from population-based reference values to individual profiling, the ABP aims at triggering follow-up investigations concerning the potential use of endogenous substances with doping potential, which might be difficult either to identify with the existing analytical methods or to interpret based only on the results of a single biological sample. The ABP program has been on-going within the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) management since 2009, when the hematological module was officially established to discover blood doping practices, such as administration of erythropoietin (EPO) or application of blood transfusion. Since 2014, the ABP has been complemented by the steroid module, with the aim of targeting the prohibited use of testosterone and other endogenous anabolic androgenic steroids with performance enhancing or masking capability. Although the main objective is to guide and assist the anti-doping organizations in their test distribution plans, the ABP may also be used to proceed with a case to an anti-doping rule violation. Evaluation of biological markers, especially in distinguishing between doping from other confounding factors, requires high level and diversity of expertise, which is coordinated by the athlete biological passport management unit (APMU). Since 2019, the WADA accredited anti-doping laboratories are defined as the host organizations for the APMUs. The benefit of such a structure is to obtain a fully anonymous evaluation process for the passports and an additional level of expertise for the interpretation of analytical results as well as to have a fluent communication line with the analyzing laboratories when further details are needed for the analytical testing and documentation.
Highlights
Introduction to the Athlete BiologicalPassport (ABP)Most substances indicated on the prohibited list of World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) are exogenous substances, for which the analytical approach is to screen and qualitatively identify the adequate target compounds, often metabolites, in the biological sample collected for antidoping purposes; a group of substances, such as testosterone, erythropoietin (EPO) and growth hormone (GH) are model substances of endogenously produced compounds, which are present naturally in the human body but with which there is a potential risk of misuse in sports by exogenously administered, pharmaceutical products for doping purposes.The fundamental role of an anti-doping laboratory is to identify reliably the prohibited substances or their representative metabolites or markers in biological samples, which are currently urine, serum or whole blood specimens collected from the athletes
The objective of the analysis is to study the sample adequately to exclude any other sources of the adverse analytical finding (AAF) than the use of prohibited substances
The first requirement is managed by the anti-doping organizations (ADOs), who assess the risk of doping for the pool of athletes, establishes the strategies for efficient testing, requests the first analysis carried out in the sample, and collaborates with the sample collection authority (SCA) to ensure that the details of the test and sample code can be linked to the athlete’s biological passport profile as soon as the laboratory has submitted the results
Summary
In addition to efficiency of testing, this assessment—in combination with information from investigational and intelligence activities—may provide support to allocate budgetary resources as well; in accordance with the World AntiDoping Code (Article 2.2), the passport programs might be used to pursue possible anti-doping rule violations of use or attempted use of a prohibited substance or a prohibited method based on an atypical passport without having to rely on traditional, direct analytical approaches In this approach, the result evaluation is confronted by very different obstacles in order to consider and to exclude clinical conditions, pathologies, interindividual and intraindividual variation, and various other confounding factors as the reason for atypical behavior observed in the ABP [2,3,4,5,6,7]. Being still too laborious and time-consuming for routine analysis of all urine samples, GC/C/IRMS analysis provides an efficient and unique tool for the management of steroid profile cases triggered by the review of steroidal passport profiles, as well as the direct analysis of target compounds to support reporting of an AAF
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