DOPING CONTROL IN SPORTS AND THE CURRENT PROCEDURES FOR ITS DETECTION

The latest statistics on the drug abuse show the rapid increase of the cases by methamphetamine among adolescent boys and girls according to the official report by National Police Agency and newspapers. On the other hand, androgenic anabolic steroids (AAS) are the most notorious dope agent abused by sportsmen. Doping cases by world class Japanese a thletes involved a disqualification due to steroid doping. One possibl e reason for such a trend is the development of trafficking route thro ugh the illegal immigrants or private import of the steroid products v ia Internet. Non medical use of steroid hormones in society is an esca lating problem in some countries. Further more, several steroid hormon es and its precursors, e.g. pregnenolone and dehydroepiandrosterone, a re widely sold on the U.S. market as memory enhancing or anti-aging di etary supplements. Therefore, the introduction of the strategy against steroid doping in sports seems to be useful to reduce the approaching steroid problem in Japan to a minimum. The current testing procedure for hormone doping involve the high sensitive detection of trace amoun t of AAS by high resolution GC-MS after extraction using an immune-aff inity column, and the direct detection of exogenously administered nat ural steroids by measuring the carbon isotope ratio of the steroid ske leton. This paper refers to the recent advances in dope analysis in sp orts. The results obtained through the tests will also be briefly disc ussed.