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Comment by max_ | Hacker News Reader

I am too much of a layman to understand what technique the article is proposing to detect it. Could someone help me break it down?

I heard from somewhere that in blood doping, the athletes, blood is taken out and put in a freezer. Then close to the day of the competition the blood is simply put back (without any external chemicals).

I heard that this works because it improves your red blood cell count. And if your to combine it with fitness & workouts "you could do some damage".

How do the detect transfusion of your won blood? When it doesn't have any external chemicals?

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I don't claim to understand this paper very well either, but based on a skim it seems the general idea is to do longitudinal blood testing on an individual level to establish a baseline for blood parameters, to then be able to detect changes that can't easily be explained by normal physiological processes(e.g a sudden rise in hemoglobin).

This is similar to what has been suggested before, but due to many confounding factors the individualised baseline may be necessary to avoid false positives.

They can actually detect it sometimes, but I don't know how prevalent those methods are and they keep it pretty secret anyways.

The blood is usually stored in regular transfusion bags, which are made of plastic, which contains plasticisers. Those slowly leech into the blood and can be detected when taking probes, how much of it and which type specifically they detect is another question, as you already got a bunch of plasticisers in your blood.

couldn't you require the athlete to test for red blood cell count several weeks ahead of the event (randomly chosen, so they cannot dope right before the test), and then one more right on the day? If they're doping, won't you see an unusually high count compared to their previous count?

Yes this is already done, it is called a biological passport and monitors a lot of physiological markers.

However, as with all methods of doping, you can't just turn up in China or North Korea [1] and demand to have their athletes tested. They'll just 'lose' the WADA officials passports at the airport until the athletes can finish their training camps in the region.

And it doesn't even matter if you test clean at the competition then, if you're able to dope completely unbothered during 9/10ths of the year.

[1] By no means do I claim those are the only 'dirty' nations

If athletes don't get tested they can't compete in doping controlled competitions.

Of course the athletes trom those nations will go to the olympics, just look at how they're going to competitions, just to provide a urine sample, not even participating. Of course 'clean', to current testing standards at that point in time. It's also extremely useful to have your national anti-doping agency just help you improve your detection-evasion game, determining the limits of how much, what and when to consume the drugs.

They don't get tested when it matters, just at times they can basically choose, it's not much more than a intelligence test for their team doctors at that point.

So saline infusions are disallowed, too?

From what you describe I don’t even understand how this is considered doping, unless the athlete is doing this to cover up for other substances in their blood during their training. Could anyone elaborate?

increased red blood cell count = increased capacity to carry oxygen = increased aerobic endurance

Raising the amount of red blood cells gives you an advantage because the blood can carry more oxygen. This leads to a race where everyone tries to raise it as far as possible. This is quite dangerous, because the blood gets ever thicker (which leads to thrombosis, as with the cyclist Tom Simpson in 1967). Banning blood doping helps to protect the athletes as well.

Pretty much all bans against PEDs and doping are to protect the athletes. If you allow them then the winner is whoever pushes their body furthest without going over the point that kills them, and a lot of people end up going over.

Blood doping is listed as a prohibited procedure by various sports organizations (e.g. the world anti-doping code), and thus is doping by their fiat. According to wikipedia, the Olympics first banned the practice in 1985, so reading commentary from that time might be illuminating if you're unsure as to why it might be considered cheating.

This type of doping is strictly helpful. If it were allowed then everyone would have to do it. Is that what we want sports to turn into? Every athlete in a cot at the starting line, getting filled up with new blood?

> is strictly helpful.

someone mentioned that blood doping makes your blood thicker, which is dangerous (you can get clots, stroke or heart attack from it?).

Yes, I personally have an interest in human advancement, and would definitely be following that sort of competition.

I'm all in favor of safeguarding the athletes, but I feel it's getting ridiculous at this stage and we should just allow for a type of competition where everything's allowed.

The more you do blood doping, your risk of a blood clot or other major complications increase. If everyone in sports blood doped, a noticable number of athletes would die or have career ending complications because of it.

> we should just allow for a type of competition where everything's allowed.

Blood doping is not illegal. You and anyone who agrees with you are 100% free to host your own Cyberpunk Olympics with whatever eligibility rules you allow. You might not be allowed to use the word Olympics because of trademark.

But if this were allowed at the Olympics, the only winners would be those who put themselves at more risk. It would effectively be mandatory if you want to even get close to the top.

Look at professional bodybuilding to see how this ends. Being competitive means taking years (decades?) off of your life expectancy, and nobody wants to see their heroes die in their 50s.

Doping is banned mainly for PR reason. The audience don't want to watch a sport where every medalist gets something injected into their body and people who refuse doing that have no chance.

There‘s a thing called „biological passport“ [0] where athletes are tested regularly for different biological parameters, including hemoglobin count. Any significant changes are suspicious.

[0] https://www.wada-ama.org/en/athlete-biological-passport

I really applaud this practice, except I have needlephobia. Let us imagine a top athlete suffers from this, too (hypothesis, irrelevant if subject is genuine). What would happen? And at which point do amateurs get tested?

Too be fair, specific phobias like that are easily treated with the right therapy(exposure therapy). If your job depends on it, it seems like a poor excuse.

The paper covers multiple blood doping method from transfusion, epo drugs, and gene transfer.

The interesting one is blood transfusion. The paper suggests that measuring certain antibody levels (change from baseline) can detect allogenic blood transfusion (blood from other individuals).

But for autologous blood transfer (removing blood, allowing the body to replace the blood cells, then injecting blood back to boost levels above normal) is impossible to detect. CO rebreathing measurements could be used but aren’t validated.

However, sports regulations have a max Hb cutoff so raising levels beyond a “high-normal” would disqualify you anyways. The only option is to raise levels if your normal Hb level is middle to low in the normal range.

As other people have pointed out, biological passports track markers across time. If you suddenly recieved a transfusion of your own blood it would be obvious from the sudden increase.

But that's discussed in the article as well. Hb levels vary within an individual as well. Timing the transfusion so that Hb levels return to within "normal" physiological range (which is quite wide) would not be detectable and would not disqualify.

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