Triathlon and Asthma

This is a touchy subject but very interesting:

1)   Asthma and asthmatics are related to doping.  Asthmatic athletes look for the best management of their illness that help them to take advantage of their illness with the same token.

Asthma rife among elite athletes, finds study

It’s not unknown for elite sports people to have asthma – Paula Radcliffe and Paul Scholes are among well-known British examples – but the good news for wheezy children wistfully dreaming of a sporting career is that research is increasingly uncovering just how many asthmatics there are in top-level sport.

In fact, the figures can seem astonishing. John Dickinson from Kent university, a world expert on asthma in sport, who has tested all 33 UK-based swimmers from the British Swimming squad found 70% have some form of asthma. A similar test on the cyclists from Team Sky revealed about a third are prone to a wheeze, against a national asthma rate of about 8% to 10%.

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/dec/28/asthma-elite-athletes-study-swimmers-cyclist-eid

2)   Asthma is related to overtraining.  Low receptor sensitivity to epinephrine is a characteristic of asthma and is related to the immune system.   Asthma is also related to low testosterone level.

Disturbed Neuroendocrine-Immune Interactions in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome*

We conclude that CFS is accompanied by a relative resistance of the immune system to regulation by the neuroendocrine system. Based on these data, we suggest CFS should be viewed as a disease of deficient neuroendocrine-immune communication. (J Clin Endocrinol Metab 85: 692–696, 2000)

Vutr Boles. 1988;27(4):29-32.

[The serum testosterone level of patients with bronchial asthma treated with corticosteroids and untreated].

 Low blood testosterone was found mainly in the patients with severe (37.76%) and moderate (40.00%) form of the disease and very rarely in patients with mild form of bronchial asthma (8.51%). The basic testosterone level changes are probably due to the stress, hypoxia and corticosteroid treatment. The possibility of a direct suppressive action of exo- and endoallergens on the testes are discussed.

Let’s take a look at a real clinical case:

Rupp adds that he has had asthma and severe allergies since childhood, "long before I met Alberto," and, "at all times, my medical treatment has been for health reasons."

One month after the mystery pills, Magness was sitting at his cubicle on the Nike campus when documents from the on-campus lab were delivered to Salazar's nearby desk. The lab documents contained years' worth of athletes' blood testing records, which were used to see how runners responded to altitude training meant to boost their levels of oxygen-carrying hemoglobin. According to Magness, Salazar told him to peruse the records and share his observations.

When Magness came to a page charting Rupp's hemoglobin, he was stunned to find a note that corresponded to a date when Rupp was still in high school: "presently on prednisone and testosterone medication." Magness already knew Rupp used prednisone, but various testosterone medications comprise perhaps the greatest scourge in all of sports doping, and are strictly banned save for cases of extreme medical need.

Bewildered, Magness huddled anxiously in a secluded stairwell. He took pictures of the documents with his phone, and then reached out for advice. "I called my parents," he says, to ask what he should do. They told him to ask Salazar to clarify the document.

Magness returned to his desk. He sat nervously for 15 minutes before working up the courage to follow his parents' advice, hoping there was a convincing reason for what he saw. Instead, Magness says Salazar immediately impugned the sanity of longtime Nike lab physiologist, Loren Myhre, and suggested that Myhre's battle with ALS must have diminished his faculties. (Myhre passed away in 2012, but the record Magness asked about was from 2002, a year when Myhre was given an award by Nike for his work, according to an obituary.) Salazar said Myhre was "crazy and he must be mixing it up with something else," Magness says.

"It's like, well, you're still taking advice from this guy, so why now all of a sudden is he crazy?" Magness recalls thinking.

Low testosterone level is a common finding in asthmatics because of the prednisone given or because of the asthma severity.  But the problems encountered by the Nike Project are more related to how we see each other or to the hypersensitivity with the subject.  I said once that most likely the whole cycling peloton was using performing enhancing drugs during the time of Armstrong.  The victories of Mo Farrah and Rupp have little to do with performance enhancing drugs, if they use them.  If what is said of Alberto Salazar doing experiments is true, it means that Alberto has little knowledge about performance enhancing drugs and a lot of stupidity.  If Alberto wants to know, it is just a matter of asking the cycling peloton.