Salbutamol
powder, also known as albuterol, is a medication that opens up
constricted medium and large airways in the lungs and is often used to
treat asthma. Because high doses are suspected by some to also have an
anabolic effect, its daily dosage is restricted by the World Anti-Doping
Agency, which uses urine tests to determine violations. A new British
Journal of Clinical Pharmacology study shows that large variability in
urine concentrations, however, lead to infeasibility of determining an
administered dose from a single untimed urine sample.
wisepoqder Salbutamol powder
The authors noted that the current threshold inadvertently leads to
incorrect assumptions of violation, whereas many violations will go
unnoticed, especially when samples are taken long after drug
administration. These issues, combined with the dubious assertion of its
anabolic effect, indicate that the large effort involved in testing
should be reconsidered.
"Using available pharmacological knowledge, we demonstrate that the
current approach to detect excessive salbutamol use is fundamentally
flawed and cannot differentiate between illegal and allowed use," said
co-author Jules Heuberger, of the Centre for Human Drug Research, in
Leiden, The Netherlands. "If the doping community is determined to
control for excessive salbutamol use, these procedures should be
changed, ideally in collaboration with clinical pharmacologists."
The Wall