Viagra Could Be Banned By Anti-Doping Agency
3 CommentsBy Ed Silverman // November 23rd, 2008 // 5:01 am
The World Anti-Doping Agency is investigating whether the little blue impotence pill creates an unfair competitive advantage for athletes by dilating blood vessels and unduly increasing oxygen-carrying capacity. If so, the agency will consider banning the Pfizer drug, The New York Times writes. Athletes, by the way, call the pill Vitamin V (back story).
Viagra, you may recall, was devised to treat pulmonary hypertension, or high blood pressure in arteries of the lungs. The drug works by suppressing an enzyme that controls blood flow, allowing the vessels to relax and widen. The same mechanism facilitates blood flow into the penis of impotent men, the Times reminds us and points out that, in the case of athletes, increased cardiac output and more efficient transport of oxygenated fuel to the muscles can enhance endurance.
“Basically, it allows you to compete with a sea level, or near-sea level, aerobic capacity at altitude,” Ken Rundell, who heads an agency financed study at Marywood University, tells the paper. Several years ago, word spread Viagra was being given to dogs at racetracks, according to Travis Tygart, who heads the US Anti-Doping Agency. There is suspicion Viagra may be used to circumvent doping controls in cycling, which has faced scandals (back story). And do you remember reports that many athletes, such as Roger Clemens, take Viagra? (see here).
A 2006 study published in The Journal of Applied Physiology indicated some participants taking Viagra improved their performances by nearly 40 percent in 10-kilometer cycling time trials conducted at a simulated altitude of 12,700 feet - a height far above general elite athletic competition, the Times writes. Viagra did not significantly enhance performance at sea level, where blood vessels are fully dilated in healthy athletes.
The University of Miami is studying whether Viagra benefits aerobic capacity at lower altitudes than the Stanford study - comparable to heights where elite competitions take place. This study is also examining whether there is a difference in the way Viagra affects male and female athletes.
A University of Marywood study is measuring the potential effects of Viagra as an antidote to air pollution, produced outdoors by the exhaust of factories and automobiles and indoors by ice-resurfacing machines. Studies involving animals, and children in Mexico City, indicated pollution causes pulmonary hypertension. If that could be alleviated for athletes by Viagra, “performance is going to be enhanced,” Rundell, the lead researcher of the pollution study, tells the Times.
The earliest the World Anti-Doping Agency could place Viagra on its list of prohibited substances would be September 2009, five months before the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, British Columbia, a spokesman tells the Times.
“My guess is, it’s a pretty easy decision to make,” Rundell tells the paper. “It’s a compound that’s pretty easily measured. And it clearly provides an unfair advantage, at least at altitude. I couldn’t imagine it not going down on the list, but I’m not the one who makes those decisions.”
Salmon
“Viagra, you may recall, was devised to treat pulmonary hypertension, or high blood pressure in arteries of the lungs. The drug works by suppressing an enzyme that controls blood flow, allowing the vessels to relax and widen. The same mechanism facilitates blood flow into the penis of impotent men, the Times reminds us and points out that, in the case of athletes, increased cardiac output and more efficient transport of oxygenated fuel to the muscles can ENHANCE ENDURANCE.”
So if you have a drug that causes Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension say by stimulating the serotonin 5HT2B receptor or inhibiting COX, the first symtoms you would expect to see would be tiredness and shortness of breath.
You might even expect to see more of this in the presence of other drugs that stimulate production of the toxic metabolite that stimulates this receptor. So if you’re a drug company you would want to avoid doing clinical studies with this drug and use piddily doses in your drug interaction studies, and you would misdirect people as to the metabolism and the actual changes in metabolism with the drug interaction studies.
You then might get edema, heart failure, and angina. Heart attacks, cardiac arrhythmias, and sudden death may take even longer in the majority of people, for example the more severe symptoms might take over a year like with Vioxx. But remember Vioxx is mainly taken by the elderly where you already have underlying cardiovascular disease and so it may show up earlier than in younge adults or children.
But of course there will always be some people who due to genetics or some other factor may have lethal complications almost immediately.
Some other things you may see are newborns dying in the first few days of life due to suffocation secondary to PAH, plus you may seen a lot of lost fetuses around 22 weeks when the placenta needs to vascularize more and even children with PAH and their placentas may be small at birth.
Since this is due to a basic mechanism you wouldn’t only see this with a single drug but possibly with other related drugs.
Salmon
Lisa Van S
Hi Ed,.. Up awfully early!.. Difficulty Sleeping, Try Lunesta!!
Barbara Rice DeShong, Ph.D.
When did the focus go from managing and curing disease to artificially increasing sexual ability? Just as women are offered doctors to make them look younger,so come the pills. What happened to life evolving into a less self-centered focus as we get older?