>The introduction of the athlete biological Passport (ABP) by the world Anti-Doping agency (WADA) is intended to equip anti-doping organizations with a robust framework in which to pursue anti-doping guideline violations and to support intelligent, targeted testing of athletes (WADA 2009). The physiological basis of this technique is that biological variables, typically maintained in homeostasis, will be disturbed when an athlete dopes. Longitudinal assessment of an athlete’s results is for that reason employed to identify abnormal changes caused by doping against a background of normal biological variability.Some insight into the normal biological variability encountered in professional endurance athletes have been previously described by few scientific studies. For cyclists (the international Cycling Union or UCI, was the first to formally execute a passport approach) haemoglobin concentration ([Hb]) has been shown to be marginally decreased (1.3 g/dL) during the competition season, whilst exercise-induced hypervolemia has been shown to decrease Hb values by 11.5% during the trip de France (Morkeberg et al. 2009). athletes have been reported to injecting frequent “microdoses” of recombinant human erythropoietin [rhEPO] in purchase to reduce the persistence of rhEPO in their system and reduce the risk of being caught through conventional anti-doping controls (Ashenden et al. 2006).For this reason WADA has developed a particular software to evaluate longitudinal data from the ABP in purchase to discover athletes cheating using illegal substances like rhEPO.A lot of doubts have been already raised by the sensitivity of the software. much more doubts are clear now. A very recent paper from Ashenden et al. (2011) now puts some major doubts on this software’s ability to discover cheats. Ashenden and colleagues injected 10 healthy subjects with a microdose regimen and monitored blood values using the ABP software. Their objective was to evaluate whether the software would flag the subject’s blood results as abnormal during the midst of a rhEPO microdose programme. ten subjects were given twice weekly intravenous injections of rhEPO for up to 12 weeks.The treatment regimen elicited a 10% increase in total haemoglobin mass equivalent to roughly two bags of re-infused blood. The passport software did not flag any subjects as being suspicious of doping whilst they were receiving rhEPO.This shows how major the issue is and the need to do much more large scale studies to improve the detection algorithms of the ABP software and become an effective tool to identify cheats. For sure, investigations of other detection techniques ought to also be sought.
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