Endocrine Abstracts

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) banned blood doping in 1988 after the discovery that cyclists were transfusing homologous blood at the Los Angeles Olympic Games in 1984. Recombinant erythropoietin (EPO) was developed for the treatment of anaemia following the cloning of the human EPO gene in 1984. Unfortunately, sports competitors could then misuse EPO to increase circulating haemoglobin and its oxygen carrying capacity in order to gain an advantage in endurance even...

Methyl oxime–trimethylsilyl (MO-TMS) derivatisation with gas chromatography–mass spectrometric (GC-MS) analysis has been well established in the analysis of glucocorticoids and is still used in many laboratories for profiling endogenous steroids for clinical purposes. There appears to be a clinical need to extend the analysis to xenobiotic glucocorticoids, primarily to elucidate cases of patients presenting with adverse symptoms associated with glucocorticoid excess,...