Diagnostic Relevance of Salivary Testosterone Concentrations in Doping Control.
Status:
Unknown status
Trial end date:
2015-12-01
Target enrollment:
Participant gender:
Summary
It is generally accepted that chemical testing of biologic fluids is the most objective means
of diagnosis of drug use. In recent years saliva has attracted much attention. The prime
advantage of saliva is that it offers non-invasive, stress-free and real-time repeated
sampling whereas blood collection is undesirable, difficult and expensive. In addition, it is
known that androgens such as testosterone can be assayed in saliva, as these steroids pass
the endothelial-epithelial barriers by passive diffusion. Nevertheless, the correlations of
blood, urine and saliva concentrations are not well documented. In recent reviews, it is
pointed out that salivary hormone analysis could be a promising method for sports medicine
and doping control, but much work is needed before the use of saliva samples in this area
receives the acceptance. According to recent studies the increase of testosterone
concentration in saliva is significantly higher than alterations of steroid concentrations
(or ratios) in blood or urine. Saliva concentration may therefore serve as screening
parameter to select suspicious cases for further target evaluation (e.g. by IRMS). This may
be beneficial to identify cases of transdermal administration of low steroid doses. It is
therefore the aim of the present project to detect administered testosterone in saliva and
compare these levels to those in blood and urine. The intention is not to detect high dosage
but low dosage abuse of testosterone, as a single-dose by patch application. From the
practical point of view saliva could offer a complementary specimen for a pre-screening of
testosterone. So it could be assumed that salivary testosterone exceed upon plasma and/or
urine levels. So the present study could be the base for a new method to preselect the
suspicious samples for testosterone abuse.