As always, the creativity used to explain away a positive is astonishing. I wonder if Jeannie Longo, another aging athlete who was rumored on another thread also to have stayed out of competition to hush up a positive, will try to trot out excuses like these if her case heats up. As in the Landis case, the athlete is taking advantage of the fact that with these cutting-edge anti-doping tests, there are numerous factors that might in theory affect the results, and which simply have not yet been tested. One can always claim that if he did such and such, the test outcome would be changed in a way that increased the likelihood of a false positive.
Veerpalu claimed that because more than the recommended 36 hours had elapsed between when his blood sample was collected and when it was centrifuged, the result should be invalid. In the hearing minutes, Dr. Osquel Barroso noted that the longer delay would lead to under-reporting the true concentration of HGH in the blood, not to a false postive. Barroso, who works for the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), was serving as the independent expert, although FIS acknowledged its ties to WADA.
Because antidoping test protocols are not publicized, FasterSkier was unable to confirm either side of the argument. Confusingly, the test window for HGH is approximately 36 hours, after which injected hormones are no longer detectable in the bloodstream if a sample is collected. Veerpalu, however, is talking about a 36-hour delay between the sample collection and processing, which is a separate issue.
Veerpalu was apparently trying to conflate the 36 hour window in which hormone changes can be detected in blood following injection with the length of time which the sample can be stored. AFAIK, there is no rule about the latter, and if the sample was properly stored, there should be no problem. Not sure what Barroso meant. The HGH test is based on changes in the proportions of certain HGH isoforms in the blood, not on the absolute levels or concentrations of any one of them. I think he was referring to the possibility that over time in storage there might be some degradation of HGH, but the key question is whether some isoforms are degraded more quickly than others. This is conceivable, but unless the sample was stored refrigerated for a far longer time than usual, he would not have a case.
Veerpalu also claimed that the long workout he had just completed must have changed his blood chemistry.
But while a 1999 study by a group of European and Australian researchers showed that exercise did spike HGH levels in the bloodstream by more then tenfold, the decline was dramatic after exercise stopped. The scientists reported that the half-life of HGH was just twenty minutes, meaning that if Veerpalu experienced a normal-sized spike in HGH, by the time he was tested two hours later the concentration in his blood would have returned to normal.
However, his team also argues that he was genetically predisposed to a higher-than-usual spike in HGH. An Estonian scientist named Anton Terasmaa claims to have sequenced Veerpalu’s DNA and revealed a mutation.
“Andrus Veerpalu exhibits uniquely strong post-exertion production of growth hormone,” he told Estonian Public Broadcasting in late August. “It became evident that while other skiers had a tenfold rise in the level of growth hormone, in Veerpalu it was a hundredfold.”
If Veerpalu did experience a hundredfold increase in HGH, then after two hours his blood would still show higher-than-normal levels of the hormone.
This is a wild claim, one of the most innovative rationalizations of a positive the Clinic has encountered yet! In the first place, I doubt very much that there is any evidence for a genetic predisposition to an exercise-induced spike that is ten times higher than normal (If indeed it is; several studies have shown that spikes of 100x resting levels can occur). Even if there were such studies, it is even more unlikely that they would trace it to an unusual SNP or genetic mutation. This IMO is a really desperate move, though I hope someone challenged Veerpalu to provide data documenting this 100-fold increase in HGH.
But all of this is probably irrelevant, anyway, because the HGH test uses the ratio of certain isoforms of the hormone—again, not the total amount of HGH in the blood—and the available studies indicate that the changes of isoforms following exercise is very likely to result in false negatives, not positives:
http://www.nature.com/aja/journal/v10/n3/pdf/aja2008254a.pdf
A major reason why isoform ratios are used is because it is well established that circulating levels of HGH can vary markedly over time, not only in response to exercise, but other factors as well.
Terasmaa told the panel that Veerpalu showed higher levels of HGH because he had been living in a hotel room pressurized to simulate a high elevation. Terasmaa said that that this would increase production of HGH, but the relationship between altitude and HGH has not been researched with any degree of rigor; FIS noted that there is only a single study on how elevation affects HGH concentrations in the blood, which concluded that there was no effect.
Again, this is a very new test, and there simply hasn’t been time to determine the effects of various parameters on its outcome.
The champion’s last major line of defense was that the HGH test was not reliable.
Where have we heard this before?
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