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A study on PED effects help needed

Jul 29, 2009
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I know there is a really big flaw in what I am about to post, which is why I've not done it before but here goes.

Last year I read in "Peak performance" a report on a study of middle distance athletes.
The athletes were divided into 4 groups.
1) Were given PEDs and told they were
2) Were given PEDs and told they weren't
3) Were not given PEDs and told they were
4) Were not given PEDS and told they weren't

Interestingly when it came to subsequent performances the following was observed.

Group 1 did the best, closely followed by group 3! Group 2 were next not too far behind and finally group 4 by some way.

It was also noticed that those who thought they were on PEDs pushed themselves harder but felt much better.

Now this is the problem! I only read the article once and was obviously fascinated, I carried it around that day and discussed it with a few other people and .... lost it!

I can't therefore give you a link or reference which will no doubt be met with howls of derision.

In the end I've decided to post in the hope that someone might have heard of the study and provide a link and perhaps a but more detail. You are welcome to ignore/ridicule this post but maybe someone can help.

I wish I could remember more of the article. Particularly who did it!
 
Apr 16, 2010
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A quick look over it suggests that it's a pretty dubious trial though for the following reasons: no statement of group size & small differences between groups - therefore no ability to state confidence or reliability of the results, same people in each group?, short test - probably not allowing for much effect of PED, suitable PED for the test, etc etc... It's basically a 3 minute blast on a bike. If it was a 170km road race, with more than 10 people in each sample group, and a good description of the PED dose etc given, then it would have some credibility.

Unless you can track down a copy of the orginal article (PubMed ID: 17876973) and it turns out it actually was well-designed and -controlled study (which i doubt), then i'm sorry to say it's probably not worth drawing too many conclusions from. Too easy to agree with researchers' conclusions, even though they're often not very well founded
 
Jul 29, 2009
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petesam said:
A quick look over it suggests that it's a pretty dubious trial though for the following reasons: no statement of group size & small differences between groups - therefore no ability to state confidence or reliability of the results, same people in each group?, short test - probably not allowing for much effect of PED, suitable PED for the test, etc etc... It's basically a 3 minute blast on a bike. If it was a 170km road race, with more than 10 people in each sample group, and a good description of the PED dose etc given, then it would have some credibility.

Unless you can track down a copy of the orginal article (PubMed ID: 17876973) and it turns out it actually was well-designed and -controlled study (which i doubt), then i'm sorry to say it's probably not worth drawing too many conclusions from. Too easy to agree with researchers' conclusions, even though they're often not very well founded

I agree. The conclusions have important implications and so I am surprised I've not heard that study quoted more widely (actually at all) and that made me somewhat skeptical. I would be interested if anyone knows of any studies that either support or undermine it's conclusions.

I will try and track down and read the original article but my time is about to be very limited!
 
Jun 15, 2009
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SirLes said:
I agree. The conclusions have important implications and so I am surprised I've not heard that study quoted more widely (actually at all) and that made me somewhat skeptical. I would be interested if anyone knows of any studies that either support or undermine it's conclusions.

I will try and track down and read the original article but my time is about to be very limited!

As i always said: Most performance enhancing of Doping comes from the placebo effect.

I once posted many studies which came to this conclusion. Somehow it got lost here, may because it didn´t fit in the opinions here.

Not working are:
1.) Nandrolon
2.) human growth hormone
3.) steroids (at leat not in endurance cycling)
4.) morphine

and last but not least: EPO; at least it´s not "working" the way people think it works (higher hct = better performance).

I am not a scientist, but the studies were made by scientists, so i´ve to trust them.
 
Mar 13, 2009
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FoxxyBrown1111 said:
As i always said: Most performance enhancing of Doping comes from the placebo effect.

I once posted many studies which came to this conclusion. Somehow it got lost here, may because it didn´t fit in the opinions here.

Not working are:
1.) Nandrolon
2.) human growth hormone
3.) steroids (at leat not in endurance cycling)
4.) morphine

and last but not least: EPO; at least it´s not "working" the way people think it works (higher hct = better performance).

I am not a scientist, but the studies were made by scientists, so i´ve to trust them.

http://journals.lww.com/acsm-msse/A...hEPO_administration_on_serum_levels_of.9.aspx

Read this article, in full if you can. Summary Vo2 max increases on average 7% from 63.6 to 68.1 after hct was increased on average from 42.7% to 50.8%. Placebo group....nada.
 
Apr 16, 2010
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Whethter placebo effect comes into play is due largely to the effectiveness of the drugs. Take a medical scenario like inhalers for severe asthma: if you did a trial where you gave one group of people had fake inhalers, but thought they were taking the drug, they'd still not be able to breathe...i.e. no placebo effect, because there's something definite and physical at work.

If however, you got lots of people with a mild headache and gave half paracetamol, and half placebo, chances are placebo would have the same effect as the drug. It's something that you have more control over, and the truth is that paracetamol may not do that much in some people.

My point is, that these studies are likely to be the same: 3m TT with minimal PED means that placebo comes into play. EPO on heamatocrit - placebo almost definitely won't do anything.

FoxxyBrown1111 said:
I am not a scientist, but the studies were made by scientists, so i´ve to trust them.

Be careful with that statement. Scientists, especially in cases like this, tend to have a vested interest in making a point. So conclusions by no means are true for every paper you read. That's why some research gets published in major journals and reaches international acclaim, and some doesn't!
 
Aug 6, 2009
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petesam said:
A quick look over it suggests that it's a pretty dubious trial though for the following reasons: no statement of group size & small differences between groups - therefore no ability to state confidence or reliability of the results, same people in each group?, short test - probably not allowing for much effect of PED, suitable PED for the test, etc etc... It's basically a 3 minute blast on a bike. If it was a 170km road race, with more than 10 people in each sample group, and a good description of the PED dose etc given, then it would have some credibility.

Unless you can track down a copy of the orginal article (PubMed ID: 17876973) and it turns out it actually was well-designed and -controlled study (which i doubt), then i'm sorry to say it's probably not worth drawing too many conclusions from. Too easy to agree with researchers' conclusions, even though they're often not very well founded
Also It's extremely ethically questionable to dope subjects and tell them you're not. In principle the Ethics have no bearing on the findings, but questionable ethics make me more sceptical that the methodology was otherwise sound.
 
Aug 6, 2009
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FoxxyBrown1111 said:
As i always said: Most performance enhancing of Doping comes from the placebo effect.

I once posted many studies which came to this conclusion. Somehow it got lost here, may because it didn´t fit in the opinions here.

Not working are:
1.) Nandrolon
2.) human growth hormone
3.) steroids (at leat not in endurance cycling)
4.) morphine

and last but not least: EPO; at least it´s not "working" the way people think it works (higher hct = better performance).

I am not a scientist, but the studies were made by scientists, so i´ve to trust them.
I'd like to see those studies if you still know where they are. I don't know about the other drugs, but the EPO studies I've seen all point to very large performance gains.
 
Jun 29, 2009
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FoxxyBrown1111 said:
As i always said: Most performance enhancing of Doping comes from the placebo effect.

I once posted many studies which came to this conclusion. Somehow it got lost here, may because it didn´t fit in the opinions here.

Not working are:
1.) Nandrolon
2.) human growth hormone
3.) steroids (at leat not in endurance cycling)
4.) morphine

and last but not least: EPO; at least it´s not "working" the way people think it works (higher hct = better performance).

I am not a scientist, but the studies were made by scientists, so i´ve to trust them.




there is a very good review article by Martial Saugy on detection methods for growth hormone (from around 2004 - 2005, if i remember well) in which he clearly says that there never is any agreement between well-controlled scientifc studies and the claims made by the athletes who actually use PEDs. and he says why: he says this is because the doping athlete takes more, she/he takes it for a longer period of time, she/he takes it in combination with other drugs*, she/he takes doses that are tailored to her/his sport and tailored to the calendar of events she/he intends to compete in and, most importantly, tailored to their response to the drug.

for example in the article, Saugy says that in doping, growth hormone is given in doses up to 8.3 mg per day. but in any well-controlled study i have ever read, the highest dose given to the subjects was probably 0.065 mg/kg, meaning 4.8 mg for a subject weighing 75 kg.
why 0.065 odd mg/kg? because this is the highest dose recommanded by the manufacturers.

and the first well-controlled scientific study to demonstrate that testosterone does work (and that it works in a dose-dependend manner) did so by using humongous doses of 600mg once a week (the dose recommanded by the manufacturer is 1000 mg once every 3 months) and by assigning the subjects to strict diets. the article is by Shalender Bashin, who has done a lot of work on the subject.

also, this observation by petesam is very correct:
petesam said:
A quick look over it suggests that it's a pretty dubious trial though for the following reasons: no statement of group size & small differences between groups - therefore no ability to state confidence or reliability of the results, same people in each group?
(...)
i'm sorry to say it's probably not worth drawing too many conclusions from. Too easy to agree with researchers' conclusions, even though they're often not very well founded

it is very true and it is also a general problem of doping rerearch: the problem with scientific studies of this kind is that they have to use statistics to make their conclusion but the researchers doing the piece of work are actually physiologists, medical doctors, chemists, pharmacologists... they know how to run statistical test X (they know how to press a bouton on their computer), but often, they do not understand the assumptions of the test - in kinder words: they don't always pay enough attention as to whether statistical test X is able to deal with the setup of their current study (one of the reasons why they don't pay enough attention is because when running a statistical test, the test automatically calculates a reliability estimate that says: "the stuff i've just calculated is reliable to x %", and they take it to mean that everything is statistically sound).
so doping researchers are not expert statisticians, and sometimes they get their study designs wrong, or they get their final stats wrong.
and therefore, we should not believe everything that is being published.

when i was preparing for my viva as a phd student, i remember going through one research article by one of my examiners that had appalling statistical quality. and yet he is a very renowned scientist in his field.

speaking about statistics, another reason why studies investigating the PED effects of X fail to identify any doping effect is probably because they always use very small sample sizes.

Liu and co-workers have done a very interesting work that shows this: they reviewed all the well-controled studies ever published on growth hormone as a PED and wanted to see if by averaging the results of these studies, they could come to the conclusion that growth hormone is effective as a doping agent (sorry i can't remember the year, but the article should be easy to google up with the key words "meta analysis" "growth hormone" "doping"). they only managed to gather about 30 studies; these studies used a total of 450 odd subjects. this makes an average of 15 subjects per well-controled study (suitable for comparison) on growth hormone as a PED in the last decade or so.

the rules of statistics say that when a small sample size is used (like in the growth hormone example here: 15 subjects, say 8 subjects with growth hormone compared to 7 subjects with placebo) your comparison will only be reliable statistically if the difference between the 2 groups is a big difference. and i think when i say big difference, on 15 subjects, using growth hormone alone, and in small quantities, i really mean big difference; of the kind that you can tell by just watching them pedal, you don't need any statistical analysis anymore.

and so, these studies with small sample sizes are probably fundamentally flawed from the beginning, because they are looking (only able to look) for large variations using a single input parameters whereas doping is about fine-tuning one's performance by varying many different parameters.

the design of these "well-controled" studies is derived from the clinical trials run in the pharmaceutical industry where people want to verify that drug X does effectively lower your blood pressure, for example, but doping is quite different, i guess it would probably need its own type of studies.




*regarding the fact that PEDs are often taken as combinations, i was just thinking: FoxxyBrown1111 mentions a study that found that EPO doesn't work. maybe they have forgotten to also administer iron to the subjects before administering EPO.
 
Jul 29, 2009
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What concerns me slightly from what I have been reading is that the scientific evidence for the differing effects of doping and the requisite amounts etc is limited, but clearly there are a number of "doctors" (and lay people) administering this stuff.

How do they know what is most effective? trial and error? (somewhat dangerous but would explain several deaths!), unpublished secret trials using athlete guinea pigs? or just making it up?

The other thing that concerns me is that there are a lot of desperate young athletes with no scientific training and in some cases less than stellar intellect, coupled with some clearly very unscrupulous doctors out to make a quick and illegal buck.

Combine over inflated claims made by quacks trying to sell stuff (some is good more is better , too much is just right), the placebo effect which I'm sure is very strong in athletes where mental state influences performance ( hell i go faster if I put my best kit on!) and the fact that PEDs do have a real beneficial effect and you get .....

Glad I'm not a young pro cyclist.
 

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