0000000000681371
AUTHOR
Andreas M. Niess
Influence of various preseason training in elite youth soccer players
Aim Endurance capacity of each individual soccer player can notably influence a team’s success. The opinion about the necessity of generic endurance specific training in soccer, especially in adolescent athletes, still varies widely.
Prediction Profiles for Nutritional Supplement Use Among Young German Elite Athletes
Nutritional supplements (NS) are defined as concentrated sources of nutrients and other substances that have a nutritional or physiological effect and that are used in high frequency among athletes. The study aimed to create a prediction profile for young elite athletes to identify those athletes who have a higher relative risk for using NS. The second objective was to examine the hypothesis that the consumption of NS paves a gateway for the use of illicit drugs and doping substances. A self-designed anonymous paper-and-pencil questionnaire was used to examine the prevalence of NS consumption, doping, and illicit drug use in elite athletes with a mean age of 17 years (SD = 4 years). Logisti…
Direct and long-term detection of gene doping in conventional blood samples
The misuse of somatic gene therapy for the purpose of enhancing athletic performance is perceived as a coming threat to the world of sports and categorized as 'gene doping'. This article describes a direct detection approach for gene doping that gives a clear yes-or-no answer based on the presence or absence of transgenic DNA in peripheral blood samples. By exploiting a priming strategy to specifically amplify intronless DNA sequences, we developed PCR protocols allowing the detection of very small amounts of transgenic DNA in genomic DNA samples to screen for six prime candidate genes. Our detection strategy was verified in a mouse model, giving positive signals from minute amounts (20 μl)…