EPO

addoustry wrote:

After hearing about the EPO test, it seems that it would be pretty easy to take small amounts of EPO and not get caught. I don't know much about the drug or the test, but it seems to me one could enhance their performance by quite a bit (probably a second a lap or so) by using a small amount. Any knowledged people on here care to share some knowledge about EPO, testing, and its magnitude of performance enhancement?

I am not an expert, but I have read that "microdosing" is the current protocol for using EPO, along with the use of peptides (placed on the fingers or penis) which destroy EPO in urine samples.

Think about it. You take a very small dose of EPO before bed each night. If anyone comes to the door in the middle of the night, you don't answer it---and I believe there is a grace period of X hours. You are happy to provide urine in the morning, but by then you are able to pass the test. Much easier in T&F than with, say, the Tour De France where you also can't go over 50% hemocrit...

And EPO helps a buttload--perhaps a minute or so over 10,000 meters, 5 seconds over the mile, etc.

"People are forgetting Cathal Lombard of Cork in Ireland who at 27 took his PB from 14:25 to 13:19 in one season and could take 13:00 mins this season if he keeps improving, ..."

Lombard later tested positive for EPO and actually admitted to it. Apparently, he had the goods delivered to his house under his name.

14:25 to 13:19 in one season, well that takes someone from being very good to qualifying for World teams.

Do a search for Cathal and read the posts, pretty sad.

dude! I need some of that shit!

EPO isn't worth 60 seconds in a 5000m race, nowhere near.

Where can you get EPO? Do they sell it in Tia Juana?

World-wide EPO sales are $10 billion a year. It is one of the largest selling drugs in the world. Medicade reimburses $2.5 billion of EPO sales a year, the largest reimbursement of any drug.

Here one of thousands of internet sources to get EPO

http://www.made-in-china.com/showroom/fourrings

They also have 'riods and HGH, see their product list.

Regarding the benefit of EPO, it is impossible to quantify. It increases red blood cells. So does living at altitude and a altitude tent. It depends what your hemocrit level is when you start and what you boost it to.

Everyone will start at a different level and EPO will raise your hemocrit level per your dosage and body chemistry.

Move to Boulder, does the same thing and it's legal (altitude tents won;t be soon)

Last thought, the current EPO is ruEPO, it is produced by recombinant DNA technology in mammalian cell cultures.

Their is a new version called dynEPO coming this year. Dynepo is to be made in cultured human cells.

No test exists for it (since it is not synthetic) and one may never exist.

Remember your body does produce EPO. You can produce more living at altitude. The only way it can be deteceted is ruEPO is syntethic. dynEPO is not synthetic.

You don't want to mess with that shit. You won't know how much to take.... it can kill you, and you are far better off just improving your training anyway.

Oh one other thing, it's cheating if you do it to improve your race times.

Isnt this stuff super expensive? How much would it cost to see benefits???

Training harder and smarter won't cost you anything. You can be as good as you want. It depends how much yo want it.

As for the cost of EPO I don't know and I don't care.

"Super expensive" is relative. You can get about 16 weeks worth for well less than $1000. About $80 week. That is if you buy some of the generic forms from an off-shore drug store like the link above.

dynEPO, once generic forms are available, should be far cheaper. Dynepo is to be made in cultured human cells. It is therefore expected to have an authentic human form of sialic acid and other oligosaccharide residues. This characteristic may make it a longer-acting product than existing brands, but clinical data have not yet been made public. So, if the rumors are true, you'll to take need less for the same benefit.

oh boy wrote:

EPO isn't worth 60 seconds in a 5000m race, nowhere near.

True. It gives guys like KB or Geb about 15 - 20 seconds.

So EPO improves their sprinting speed?

The difference between them and guys like Hall and Ritz are their speed 48-49 400m vs. 51-52. Mottram got the speed, thats why he can compete with them.

Look at speed and look at technique!

Guys like Kennedy,Lopes, Baldini and Salazar got way better endurance than any african. How is that possible?

Bekele with the same endurance would run sub-26.00 in 10k.

It's easy to get wrote:

World-wide EPO sales are $10 billion a year. It is one of the largest selling drugs in the world. Medicade reimburses $2.5 billion of EPO sales a year, the largest reimbursement of any drug.

Could you post sources for this info?

pjb6 wrote:

Could you post sources for this info?

This is old (2005) but it gets the point accross See the first four

Here's an article from Spetember that says EPO is meidcare's number reumbursed drug

Let me read between the lines of your question. Many here are healthy athletes so they are not familar with the diseases and problems of the sick and aging. Thank god for this.

EPO serves a huge and critical function in the medical community. So let me copy the second article as an explanation. While this article is critical some EPO use when under medicare, I picked it as it shows how important this drug is.

Understand, this is NOT a drug designed for athletes. It was never a consideration. I get the feeling many think it was developed by some mad scientists soley for endurance athletes. It was developed to save thousands of lives and make AMGEN billions of dollars.

The reason you can get it so easily is many of these patients need it to live and feel fortuntate they can get it cheaply from Chinese on-line drug stores. Otherwise, they face death as they cannot afford it otherwise!

EPO -- Again

Medicare spends more money on Amgen's Epogen than any other drug in its medicine chest -- $1.75 billion in 2005. Virtually all of it went to patients on dialysis. (The agency also pays for the same protein for cancer treatments, but those are sold under the brand names Aranesp by Amgen and Procrit by Johnson & Johnson.)

Given that level of spending, you'd think there would be pretty good evidence that this drug, which raises the red blood cell count, is delivering positive results for the unfortunates suffering from what the government and physicians euphemistically call "End Stage Renal Disease" (ESRD). The euphemism refers to the fact that the average life expectancy of a person who enters dialysis after their kidneys fail is about five years.

You'd think that but you'd be wrong. In fact, the evidence suggests just the opposite. Of course, treating the anemia associated with kidney failure was a godsend when Epogen first came on the market in 1987. It ended the need for blood transfusions, and allowed dialysis patients to have red blood cell counts (hematocrits) near normal.

However, the Food and Drug Administration's initial approval for Epogen called for raising hematocrits to about 15 percent below normal. While most patients don't notice the difference, Amgen, through a series of studies it funded, attempted to show that higher hematocrits were better for patients. Their measuring sticks? "More energy" and "greater alertness." Through intense lobbying, they used those studies to browbeat Medicare into reimbursing dialysis clinics to raise hematocrits to slightly below normal. Not surprisingly, in the wake of that 1997 decision, Medicare spending on Epogen soared.

But what were the medical results of that policy? In a paper published in 2004 in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, Dennis Cotter of the Medical Technology and Practice Patterns Institute and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins and the Boston VA showed that attempts to reach normal hematocrits, which required LOTS more Epogen, did not correlate with increased longevity for people on dialysis. In fact, they showed that raising ESRD patients' hematocrits to normal levels actually resulted in shorter lifespans because it increases the incidence of heart attacks, strokes and other cardiovascular events.

Gee. You mean thickening the blood in people who have severe microvascular distress from a lifetime of untreated hypertension and diabetes (which are the primary causes of kidney failure) causes heart attacks? To quote that famous line in Casablanca, I'm shocked.

Now, Cotter and colleagues are back in the latest issue of Health Affairs (subscription required), bringing us up to date on the Bush administration's policy on Medicare spending for Epogen. In a move that NO ONE in the mainstream press covered (Hey, another half billion dollars in drug spending? Who cares?), CMS this past April gave dialysis clinics the okay to raise patients' hematocrits to 39, which is normal for women and a shade under normal for men.

If Cotter's earlier paper is correct, the end result of this policy will be shorter lifespans for many dialysis patients, but greater sales and higher profits for Amgen. To use the dry language of the Health Affairs study, "CMS has tacitly implemented a policy that does not appear to confer additional proven benefit to its beneficiaries."

What would Cotter do about it? First, improve the evidence for drugs Medicare buys. Payment decisions should no longer be based on surrogate markers like the relationship between higher hematocrits and a subjective measure like "more energy."

Second, the agency should require randomized clinical trials, systematic reviews and meta-analyses to prove that a drug it pays for results in better outcomes for patients. In addition, since the companies selling the drugs have a stake in the outcome, those trials, reviews and analyses should be conducted by physicians without conflicts of interest.

Finally, if CMS doesn't have that kind of evidence generated in independent studies, it shouldn't pay for any drug that has not been prescribed for an FDA-approved use and at an FDA-recommended dosage.

This past week, Bernadine Healey, the former head of the National Institutes of Health, launched a wrong-headed attack against evidence-based medicine in U.S. News and World Report. (For a good blog entry attacking her article, see Gavin Yamey's latest posting on the PLoS Medicine website.) The Amgen-Epogen-dialysis saga is a perfect example of how ignoring the evidence is costing taxpayers a bundle.

Meanwhile, economic pundits like Robert Samuelson (see today's Washington Post) rail against increased Medicare spending (even though its costs are rising at a much lower rate than overall health care spending, a fact I wish he had mentioned in today's column).

But I agreed with his larger point, which is that uncontrolled health care spending (not just Medicare) will bankrupt the rest of the economy if left unchecked. But how should we rein it in? But cutting benefits and raising first-dollar coverage so people will simply stop going to the doctor for minor ailments and preventive care?

That would be a tragedy. What we need now are reporters in the mainstream media willing to go after companies like Amgen that rip off Medicare. Of course, we also need courageous editors willing to ignore the fact that the drug industry's full page ads are a major prop in their shrinking bottom lines.

But that's another story

oh boy wrote:

You don't want to mess with that shit. You won't know how much to take.... it can kill you, and you are far better off just improving your training anyway.

Oh one other thing, it's cheating if you do it to improve your race times.

HOLY SH*T?! Are you for real?! Dude, none of us had a clue....

epomania wrote:

So EPO improves their sprinting speed?

The difference between them and guys like Hall and Ritz are their speed 48-49 400m vs. 51-52. Mottram got the speed, thats why he can compete with them.

Look at speed and look at technique!

Guys like Kennedy,Lopes, Baldini and Salazar got way better endurance than any african. How is that possible?

Bekele with the same endurance would run sub-26.00 in 10k.

Nepalese Sherpas have hemotcrit levels that are out of sight. They live at 15,000 feet and can climb to the top of Mt. Everest without oxygen. Their blood must be like mud with all the red blood cells they have to survive at this altitude.

So, how come you never see an Nepelese endurance athletes? Especially in distance running, the most basic of endurance sports?

Answer, becuase raising one's hemocrit level is a factor that helps but it is not a magic bullet like so many protray here.

The effects of EPO are way way overstated. Don't get me wrong, it helps, but nothing like the numbers thrown around in this thread. Especially for guys like Geb and Bekele that grew up at altitude, Their hemocrit levels are high enough naturally.

Maybe for a sea-level athlete with a lower hemocrit level it matters a lot, but not for people that live at alititude.

This is why its so big in cycling, they are sea-level europeans, it make a difference. Additioanlly, a bunch of sea-level russians and eastern europeans it would help too. But altitude africans it would have a very marginal effect. They would be better off with anabolic agents to aid in recovery enabling them to keep up killer workout schedules.

Another reason EPO is so prevelent in cycling is the nature of the sport. Riding 2,000 miles in 21 days takes a HUGE toll on the body. Way more than distance running.

Pedro Delgado, 1988 tour winner, said that riders that don't get "assistance" during the tour would end of anemnic at the end. He's right, from a medical standpoint. In fact, this is why the tour organizers considered shortening the tour in 2007, as a way to deter drug usage. In the end they decided to keep it the same.

EPO makes a big big difference in cycling. The posts above make it sound like it not nearly as helpful in distance running, but helpful nevertheless.

Rio Grande wrote:

Another reason EPO is so prevelent in cycling is the nature of the sport. Riding 2,000 miles in 21 days takes a HUGE toll on the body. Way more than distance running.

Pedro Delgado, 1988 tour winner, said that riders that don't get "assistance" during the tour would end of anemnic at the end. He's right, from a medical standpoint. In fact, this is why the tour organizers considered shortening the tour in 2007, as a way to deter drug usage. In the end they decided to keep it the same.

EPO makes a big big difference in cycling. The posts above make it sound like it not nearly as helpful in distance running, but helpful nevertheless.

Riders don't get anemic at the end of the Tour, that's total bullshit. The reason their Hematocrit goes down to 38-40 is because the Plasma volume has gone up. The amount of RBC'S stays the same.

As for the advantage of EPO in the Tour, it's probably about 1%. By the end of the first week 1% becomes 2% as the doped up riders recover faster, so although it's a small advantage physiologically, in terms of recovery and morale, it becomes a very big advantage.