Review
Drugs of abuse and the adolescent athlete
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Correspondence: Alan D Rogol adrogol@comcast.net
Riley Hospital for Children, Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis, IN, USA
University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA
Italian Journal of Pediatrics 2010, 36:19 doi:10.1186/1824-7288-36-19
Published: 18 February 2010Abstract
Doping with endocrine drugs is quite prevalent in amateur and professional athletes. The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has a list of banned drugs for athletes who compete and a strategy to detect such drugs. Some are relatively easy, anabolic steroids and erythropoietin, and others more difficult, human growth hormone (rhGH) and insulin like growth factor I (IGF-I). The use of such compounds is likely less in adolescent athletes, but the detection that much more difficult given that the baseline secretion of the endogenous hormone is shifting during pubertal development with the greatest rise in testosterone in boys occuring about the time of peak height velocity and maximal secretion of hGH and IGF-I.
This review notes the rationale, physiology, performance enhancement, adverse events and the detection of doping with insulin, rhGH, rhIGF-I, erythropoietin, and anabolic-androgenic steroids.