http://www.cyclingnews.com/news/experts-call-armstrong-hemassist-connection-unlikely
I think this is a little misleading. The results of studies of animals have been described as “increasing tissue perfusion”, which certainly sounds like performance enhancement to me. If more oxygen is delivered to tissues, that by virtually definition is performance enhancement. In fact, before the drug would have even been tried on humans, there would have had to have been strong evidence from animal studies that it increased oxygen delivery. If not, there would have been no point in further testing.
The drug was pulled following the results of Phase III trials, which indicated greater mortality rates than in controls. That does not mean that the drug did not increase oxygen delivery to tissues. Unless they actually measured such parameters, and found that there was no increase in oxygen-carrying capacity, then Schumacher’s statement is meaningless. But since neither Schumacher nor anyone else specifically refers to such data, I rather doubt that it exists, particularly since our circulatory system is not so different from that of other mammals that one would expect an effect in the latter that did not occur in our own species. If there is nothing up to now that proves it enhances performance,that is probably because, after the deaths, no one bothered to conduct carefully controlled studies of this issue.
Not to say LA did or did not ever use this drug.
Yorck Olaf Schumacher, a researcher at the Freiburg University in Germany who was part of the study of a drug similar to HemAssist called Hemopure, said that hemoglobin-based oxygen carriers (HBOCs) showed no performance benefit. "There's nothing up to now that shows or proves that it improves performance," he told AP.
I think this is a little misleading. The results of studies of animals have been described as “increasing tissue perfusion”, which certainly sounds like performance enhancement to me. If more oxygen is delivered to tissues, that by virtually definition is performance enhancement. In fact, before the drug would have even been tried on humans, there would have had to have been strong evidence from animal studies that it increased oxygen delivery. If not, there would have been no point in further testing.
The drug was pulled following the results of Phase III trials, which indicated greater mortality rates than in controls. That does not mean that the drug did not increase oxygen delivery to tissues. Unless they actually measured such parameters, and found that there was no increase in oxygen-carrying capacity, then Schumacher’s statement is meaningless. But since neither Schumacher nor anyone else specifically refers to such data, I rather doubt that it exists, particularly since our circulatory system is not so different from that of other mammals that one would expect an effect in the latter that did not occur in our own species. If there is nothing up to now that proves it enhances performance,that is probably because, after the deaths, no one bothered to conduct carefully controlled studies of this issue.
Not to say LA did or did not ever use this drug.