Projets de recherche

Code: 241A02MT

In sports drug testing, isotope ratio mass spectrometry is employed to enable the differentiation between endogenous and exogenous sources of urinary steroids, i.e. steroids produced inside the body or administered. Testosterone or testosterone-prohormones may be used by athlete for performance enhancement. As these steroids are endogenous, their presence alone in human urine is not suspicious. Only if urinary concentrations may exceed individual thresholds, a confirmation of the exogenous source becomes necessary and carbon isotope ratios proved to be the method of choice here.

Sample preparation protocols for isotope ratio mass spectrometry-based method are complicated and time-consuming as the purity of analytes is crucial and a prerequisite for valid isotope ratio determinations. Currently applied sample preparations encompass solid and liquid-liquid extraction steps to pre-purify and concentrate urine samples prior to the final clean-up step employing high performance liquid chromatography and fraction collection. This powerful tool for sample clean-up comes along with relatively long run-times per sample of more than 45 min and it may be necessary to use even a two-fold separation here.

This research project aims for improving this crucial step in sample preparation and shorten the run-times per sample by employing supercritical fluid chromatography coupled to a novel fraction collection tool. In supercritical fluid chromatography, pressurized carbon dioxide is used as solvent offering unique features for chromatographic separation not directly comparable to the commonly applied mixtures of water and organic solvent. Therefore, a novel sample preparation method suitable for isotope ratio mass spectrometry will be developed and validated within this project investigating the benefits of supercritical fluid chromatography in sports drug testing. To evaluate the new method and facilitate its implementation into routine doping controls, reference population-based values will be determined and compared to existing routine applications.

The aim of the project is to develop an anti-doping education framework for the World ParaVolley Association (WPV) For a complete list of National Federations involved, refer to World ParaVolley’s membership.

The proposed objectives will be achieved through a mixedmethods approach delineating action-oriented research. The mixed methods approach will be crucial to understanding the sports person's experience with NADA’s anti-doping educational awareness interventions and, thereby, the measures to improve them.

This project investigates the beliefs, attitudes, and awareness of doping among student-athletes in Singapore. A mixed methodologies of quantitative online surveys and qualitative interviews, focusing on student-athletes attending the National University of Singapore (NUS). In hopes to offer insight into Singapore student-athletes’ doping vulnerability, experience of the anti-doping system, and the factors shaping these aspects. Additionally, shedding light on nonsport influences on substance use among young people in larger society and how these influences might indirectly affect student-athletes’ doping attitudes in sport.

The proposed project will identify and characterize sportspecific stressors contributing to doping vulnerability among athletes, to include exploring their impact, frequency, severity, timing, and duration. Additionally, it seeks to investigate how psychological flexibility moderates the relationship between these stressors and doping vulnerability, thereby protecting athletes from doping.

A qualitative approach and informed by a co-design process with national anti-doping and sporting organizations. This project seeks to interview women in three countries to 1) investigate the role of support personnel (e.g., coaches, trainers, partners) in facilitating or preventing PIED use, and 2) to understand the broader psycho-socio-cultural factors that contribute to facilitating or preventing PIED use among female athletes. Investigating when, why, and how women choose to use or avoid PIEDs this project will gain important insights on women’s lived experiences with PIEDs.

A cross-sectional survey design and recruit a large sample of elite athletes (1500) from the said countries. The survey will include a number of validated screening tools in Spanish about self-compassion, mindfulness, sport anxiety, perfectionism, and doping susceptibility. Participants will also be invited to take part in a podcast series and to share their insights and experiences on doping in sport. In order to contribute towards more informed decision-making playing a crucial role in the prevention of doping behavior in the PANRADO Region, while focusing on a positive psychology approach emphasizing the role of mindfulness and selfcompassion.

Code: T23A04GG

The project deal with the synthesis and analytical characterization of the glucuronide phase II metabolite of the stimulant Hydrafinil (9-Hydroxyfluorene)

Code: 23E02ABA

The detection of recombinant human erythropoietin (rHuEPO) remains a continuous challenge for anti-doping authorities world-wide. Direct testing has become more intelligent and efficient, and dishonest athletes are suspected to have moved on to “micro-dosing” strategies to minimize changes in blood markers relevant for current indirect detection methods (athlete biological passport) as well as the windows of detection. The present project aims at detecting micro-doses of rHuEPO via a state-of-the-art metabolomic analysis, where a global analysis of an array of biomarkers will be evaluated in both venous blood samples and dried blood spots, hence identifying possible sensitive and specific targets. The study will be the first to evalute the metabolomic fingerprint in males and females as well as at sea-level and at altitude, the latter which is known to confound rHuEPO detection possibilities.

Code: 23D01BL

Alongside the evaluation of athletes’ samples for prohibited substances, the Athlete Biological Passport (ABP) has been established as a complementary pillar in the detection of doping. The fundamental principle of the ABP is to monitor over time athletes’ individual profiles with respect to selected biomarkers that may indirectly reveal anti-doping violations. These include, for example, markers from the Haematological Module–such as haemoglobin (Hgb) and haematocrites (Hct)–that may inform any use of substances for enhancing oxygen transport or delivery. Every time a new test is performed, doping violations are detected by noting significant deviations in the observed values from an athlete’s established levels for those biomarkers. The state-of-the-art of the ABP practical implementation is based on a Bayesian methodological framework called ADAPTIVE (Sottas et al., 2007). This approach combines population-based information with individual-based data for determining individual tolerance limits that discriminate between normal and atypical values in each of the biomarkers of interest. Such individual limits are continuously and adaptively updated as additional individual samples are observed. However, while allowing for personalised and adaptive ranges of tolerance, the ADAPTIVE approach is implemented on longitudinal profiles following a univariate testing approach. ABP profiles are analyzed by looking at every single biomarker independently and separately, without accounting for their dependency structure. To illustrate, for the hematological module, a “no start” decision can be determined by an atypical finding on at least one of the two primary biomarkers: Hgb and the OFF-score, a combination of Hgb and Hct. However, in general, biomarkers do not provide orthogonal information, either due to their intrinsic characteristics or because these are often combined quantities (e.g., the OFF score). Furthermore, little is known about their simultaneous alteration in the presence of prohibited substances. Clearly, if biomarkers present some correlation patterns (notably, this is the case of Hgb and Hct), univariate analyses may lead to questionable conclusions. The aim of this proposal is to generalize the current ADAPTIVE method–well established within the anti-doping community–allowing for simultaneous modelling and analysis of multiple biomarkers. The target is the joint evolution of multiple measurements over time. Inspired by the ubiquitous role of copula models in multivariate statistics (Nelsen, 2007), we propose to use a copula-based approach to flexibly represent the joint distribution of a set of biomarkers. This proposal will be developed under a methodological framework that leverages advanced tools from probability and statistics for better modelling complex characteristics of real-world data. We will focus on the haematological module and will evaluate the proposed framework on an original dataset of ABP profiles collected by NADO Italia.