Effect of Increased Pain Tolerance on Exercise Performance
Status:
Completed
Trial end date:
2019-03-07
Target enrollment:
Participant gender:
Summary
Clinical prescription and use of opioids is a clear problem in large parts of the world and
has the recent years received an increasing publicity in sports. This is in particular due to
the World Anti-Doping Agency monitoring list, which reveal that endurance athletes utilize
the opioid Tramadol frequently with the aim to enhance performance according to anecdotal
evidence.
Studies investigating the effect of tramadol on exercise performance in healthy humans is
limited to one study in moderate trained subjects. However, this effect may be different in
highly trained subjects due to the effects of chronic exercise. Furthermore, ingestion of
tramadol may impact motor-cognitive performance and it remains unknown whether tramadol can
be detected in highly trained subjects following exercise.
In the present study the investigators apply a randomized double-blind placebo-controlled
counterbalanced cross-over design to investigate whether tramadol treatment improves a
preloaded cycling time trial performance, whether it affects motor-cognitive performance and
whether it is detectable following exercise.