BED DOPING AND EPO

Report #6649 11/19/95

Scientists in Sweden have developed a test in time for the Atlanta Olympics to detect athletes who have used erythropoietin to increase their endurance.

Anything that increases the oxygen carrying capacity of your blood can help you to exercise longer. Since your red blood cells carry 99% of the oxygen in your blood, anything that increases the concentration of red blood cells increases endurance. At the Los Angeles Olympics, some of the American bicycle racers received blood transfusions to raise their red blood cell counts and got hepatitis, a serious liver disease, so blood doping is banned and scientists protect athletes by testing them for transfusions. Then athletes started to take injections of erythropoietin, commonly known as EPO, a hormone that increases bone marrow production of red blood cells. Several healthy Dutch bicycle racers died a couple years ago, presumably from erythropoietin-induced clots in arteries. Until now, no test was available for EPO, but the recent development of a test in Sweden will help to protect athletes from harming themselves.

You can raise your red blood cell count by sleeping high and training low. Igor Gamow, of the University of Colorado, showed that you can increase endurance by sleeping in the mountains/ where oxygen is sparse/ and training at sea level/ where oxygen is high. When you sleep at high altitudes, you breathe oxygen-sparse air, causing your kidneys to produce large amounts of erythropoietin, which stimulates your bone marrow to make more red blood cells. When you train at high altitudes, the lack of oxygen tires you out earlier, so you can't train as much.

By Gabe Mirkin, M.D., for CBS Radio News