Introductory remarks

Practitioners who work with elite athletes know that the pressure and considerable rewards involved with success provide a high level of motivation to look for any safe and legal strategy that might enhance performance, even by small margins. Dietary supplements operate in this space, whether they promise a large performance boost or just create the fear that an athlete cannot afford to miss out on what everyone else is using. It is often tempting to overlook the lack of evidence to support the claims made about a supplement on the basis that the stakes are higher for elite athletes; therefore the cost:benefit ratio favours experimentation in the absence of clear proof. Over the past decade, however, we have become aware that the cost of getting it wrong has also escalated for elite athletes. A new hazard related to supplement use has emerged: inadvertent ingestion of substances that are banned under the antidoping codes in place in elite sport, but present in supplement products. In some cases, the level of the presence, or contamination, of banned substances in supplements presents a health hazard for all consumers. In some cases, the concentration may be too small to achieve any health or performance effect but large enough to record an infringement for athletes who submit to doping tests. Newspapers, the internet and Courts of Arbitration in Sport now bear stories of dedicated athletes whose careers have been or are being jeopardised because of the ingestion of a banned substance via a dietary supplement. This problem was first brought to scientific recognition by Hans Geyer and his colleagues from the Centre for Preventive Doping Research in Cologne. The following article provides an update of a recent review by this team.1

Inadvertent doping

H Geyer and H Braun

In the past years, an increasing number of dietary supplements containing undeclared doping …