THE murky world of sports doping has been in the news recently, as accusations fly concerning the use, on a scale previously unacknowledged, of performance-enhancing drugs in athletics. But human beings are not the only animals doped to enhance their performance. Racehorses are similarly afflicted. Catching cheats in the world of horse-racing has, however, proved hard. Human and equestrian biology are different, and techniques developed for the one do not necessarily transfer to the other. Terence See Ming Wan, of the Hong Kong Jockey Club’s Racing Laboratory, hopes to change that. As he explains in a paper in Analytical Chemistry, he has developed a technique for spotting doped horses that should make it easier to catch cheats.
These days, artificial anabolic steroids are easily detected, so athletes (male ones, anyway) are turning instead to compounds like luteinising hormone to bulk up their muscles. This hormone does not act directly. Rather, it stimulates a man’s testes to produce natural testosterone, which then does the muscle-bulking. For those doping male racehorses, though, this option is often not available,...Continue reading
Source: Science and technology http://ift.tt/20twWCM
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