2012 is an Olympic year. I was in London last week where everyone was getting nervous about the preparations, and how visitors would cope with the entry regulations at London airport. The ICE/ECE 2012 marked the coming event with a session on Endocrinology and the Olympics. I caught only the last two talks, although reports of Dr Luigi Di Luigi’s presentation were very positive indeed.
Dr Arne Auchus discussed how the endocrine patient copes with subjecting their bodies to high performance sports. Endocrinology is such a varied field that it is impossible to go into detail on how individual athletes cope with their conditions, but as he pointed out, the fact that they can cope at all shows the great strides which have been made in clinical endocrinology. As he said, it would have been almost inconceivable 30 or 40 years ago to imagine someone with type 1 diabetes running a marathon.
Of course, there are some very high-profile sportspersons who have endocrine conditions and have reached the top of their field – in today’s world of sport perhaps Lionel Messi’s early problems with GHD are the best documents. The fact that he has become the best practitioner of the most popular sport in the world is a great tribute to him (and his endocrinologists, of course).
The World Anti-Doping Agency, WADA, regulates doping in sport. Although Lio Messi has been treated for growth hormone deficiency, he would benefit from WADA’s Therapeutic Use Exemption system, whereby a sportsman can be given permission to use a drug necessary to their general health. One of the great difficulties in this system of course is dosage, which is obviously important when one is taking an anabolic drug.
Dr Mario Thevis spoke about some of the problems of testing, and reinforced a point made by Dr Auchus, that testing for testosterone doping is difficult because of genetic factors (testosterone seems to have been a theme in this year’s Congress). Dr Thevis illustrated some of the practical problems in drug testing with some entertaining examples of how human frailty can make the testing less effective. For example, the case in Germany of 8 identical urine samples, taken from different athletes at different times, and even from different cities. The common factor was identified as being a hard-working drug testing inspector who was too busy to test all the athletes, and so she provided her own urine.
Professor Ebo Nieschlag wound up the session in the course of a question from the floor. “We need to send a message to all endocrinologists – do not neglect the sportsmen and women”. He said that many endocrinologists had stood aside during the development of the obesity epidemic, and we shouldn’t make the same mistake in sports. As he said, “We need to offer high quality endocrinology to help high quality sportspersons”.
For those interested in the subject, note Symposium 60, entitled 'Performance enhancing hormones in sports', is taking place at 15:15-16:45 on Tuesday 8 May in Hall H.
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