Practice regularly, say ‘no’ to drugs

By Nilma DOLE

‘Do sports, not drugs’ was a United Nations campaign that showed that there was an increase in drug use among the youth when it came to performing in sports. Where competition is strife on an international stage, pressure is always mounting on our nation’s sportstars to perform well, but everything is lost when the truth of drug use surfaces.

If the root of the problem isn’t tackled, sports personalities will take drugs for granted and when they test positive for drugs, they don’t realise the disgrace they bring on to them and their nation.

Taking former world champion, Marion Jones, it was with the pressure of having to perform well that drove her to take drugs.

We admired her when she beat our nation’s sprint queen, Susanthika Jayasinghe to take home the gold.

But we didn’t know the other side of her story which was a stunning athletic career laced with performance-enhancing drugs.

Even though she won five medals at the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia she was stripped of her awards after her October 2007 admission, after she admitted to taking drugs, lying to a grand jury investigating performance-enhancer creations by Victor Conte and the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (BALCO).

Today, we admire Susanthika for practising hard and now a silver medal winner at the 100 metres for not needing anything but strength and determination to win the race.

Speaking to the Sunday Observer was Consultant Neurologist and co-founder of Sri Lanka’s NADO (National Anti-Doping Organisation), Dr. Githanjan Mendis.

Strength

“In the sporting world, banned substances have been introduced by WADA (World Anti-Doping Agency) to combat taking drugs by sports men and women to improve their power, speed, strength and endurance,” said the doctor.

The World Anti-Doping Agency was established in 1999 with the head office based in Montreal, Canada.

The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) was founded with the belief that ‘athletes have a fundamental right to participate in doping-free sport and that doping endangers athlete’s health and the integrity of sport.’

The doctor said that it serves as the independent international body responsible for coordinating and monitoring the global fight against doping in sport.

He said, “WADA has an aim to eradicate ‘drugs in sports’ because this has become a menace in the sporting world.”

He said that sportsmen and women tend to take these banned substances when they have not done enough training and to enhance their performance.

“Anybody can perform well in international sports provided they do the training, practice and have mental stability when it comes to performing well,” said the doctor. He said that Sri Lankan sportstars don’t need to take drugs if they want to bring home the gold medal. “If only they perform, train well and put their minds to winning, they can shine without drugs,” he said. “Sri Lanka is also the same because they don’t do enough pratice and they take these drugs,” he said. Dr. Mendis explained that by taking these substances, it will perish their body and organs and also it is unfair to the other athletes by taking these.

Laboratory

Sri Lanka’s National Anti-Doping Organisation (NADO) is affiliated to WADA where urine samples of athletes are sent to India for sample testing. He said,“Sri Lanka doesn’t have its own anti-doping laboratory because it is expensive to maintain one with state-of-the-art facilities.

There are five countries in Asia that have WADA lab facilities and they are Japan, South Korea, China, Thailand and India.” The biggest problem is denying taking drugs because while athletes might fail drug tests, they always deny ever knowingly having taken a banned substance. The doctor said, “Sportstars are not average people.

For example, sprinters have low fat content and more muscule. Since fat is important in the metabolism of steroid hormones, there is a small percentage of sprinters who can perform exceptionally well without drugs,” he said.

A majority of major athletes use dietary supplements but the contents of what they use have been questionable.

Although it is undoubtedly the case that some athletes are guilty of deliberate cheating, some positive tests are likely to be the result of inadvertent ingestion of prohibited substances present in otherwise innocuous dietary supplements. Moreover, there is always a war waging between those seeking new techniques to detect illicit use of performance enhancing substances and those who wish to circumvent the rules.

Limits

Some argue that the human body should be tested to the maximum limits but does it have to be done at a cost? What athletes don’t realise is that it will put their lives in jeopardy and bodies at risk if they are constantly using drugs and performance-enhancers as this could be deadly.

Dr. Githanjan Mendis receives a merit award at the World Anti- Doping conference in Saudi Arabia

The problem of stimulants in sport reached public attention in 1960 when the Danish cyclist Knut Jenson died in the Rome Olympics and it transpired that he had been taking amphetamines.

In addition to this, testing for drugs through urine should be vigorous and can be unannounced and the penalties for being discovered are severe.

But for every action, there is an equal but opposite reaction and there will always be those who attempt to use illicit ways of enhancing performance to get the necessary slight edge that is required to win.

In the future, gene doping is looking to be the next way to performance-enhancing.

The World Anti-Doping Agency describes gene doping as 'the non-therapeutic use of cells, genes, genetic elements, or of the modulation of gene expression, having the capacity to improve athletic performance'.

Insulin

The potential for gene doping would be to inject ‘normal’ genes into the body to increase the functioning of a ‘normal’ cell. For example, genes producing insulin growth factor 1 to help muscles grow and repair.

The forthcoming London 2012 Olympics will be an important event in ensuring free and fair sporting achievements.

According to the authorities, various proposals have been made with the possibility of trialling a doping ‘passport’ to be carried by all athletes.

This would be done in a bid to record the results of doping tests and natural concentrations of hormones such as erythroprotein during their careers, the idea being that this would make it easier to detect any substance abuse.After our boxing champion lost a valuable gold medal at a prestigious world games due to drugs, let’s hope our Sri Lankan hopefuls will bring home a few Olympic medals without taking drugs!

Maternal liver grafts more tolerable for children with rare disease

Children with a rare, life-threatening disease that is the most common cause of neonatal liver failure - biliary atresia - better tolerate liver transplants from their mothers than from their fathers, according to a UCSF-led study.

In the study, researchers reviewed all paediatric liver transplants nationwide from 1996 to 2010, and compared the outcomes for patients who received liver grafts from their mothers with those for patients who received livers from their fathers.

Researchers believe the improved outcomes for children receiving a maternal liver graft may be due to higher levels of maternal cells in the patients’ livers. The presence of these cells may establish tolerance to maternal antigens - substances that induce an immune response - and therefore greater acceptance of maternal organs in these biliary atresia patients.

“This result is exciting because it supports the concept that trafficking of cells between the mother and the foetus has functional significance long after the pregnancy is over,” said senior author Tippi MacKenzie, MD, assistant professor of pediatric surgery at UCSF and a fetal surgeon at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital.

“This is a topic we are actively studying both in animal models and in patients who have foetal surgery. Practically speaking, this study may allow us to counsel families in which both the mother and father are willing and able to be a donor.”

The researchers found that patients with biliary atresia who received a transplanted maternal portion of liver had a failure rate of 3.7 percent, compared to the failure rate of 10.5 percent observed in recipients of paternal livers.

In children who had liver transplantation for other diseases, there were no differences in the transplant outcome between maternal or paternal grafts.

The results will be published in this month's issue of the American Journal of Transplantation and can be found online.*

Biliary atresia, which affects one in 10,000 newborn infants, occurs when the common bile duct between the liver and the small intestine is blocked or absent.

While early surgical intervention to treat biliary atresia is critical to prevent irreversible liver damage, once the liver fails, a liver transplant is required.

“We were testing the idea that if cells from the mother travel into the fetus during pregnancy and are involved in maternal-fetal tolerance, this phenomenon may have a long-lasting effect for transplantation tolerance when the mother donates an organ to the child,” MacKenzie said.

- Sciencedaily.com

How muscle growth is triggered by exercise

We take it for granted, but the fact that our muscles grow when we work them makes them rather unique.

Researchers have identified a key ingredient needed for that bulking up to take place. A factor produced in working muscle fibers apparently tells surrounding muscle stem cell “higher ups” that it’s time to multiply and join in, according to a study in the January Cell Metabolism.

In other words, that so-called serum response factor (Srf) translates the mechanical signal of work into a chemical one.

“This signal from the muscle fibre controls stem cell behaviour and participation in muscle growth,” said Athanassia Sotiropoulos of Inserm in France. “It is unexpected and quite interesting.” It might also lead to new ways to combat muscle atrophy.

Sotiropoulos’ team became interested in Srf’s role in muscle in part because their earlier studies in mice and humans showed that Srf concentrations decline with age. That led them to think Srf might be a culprit in the muscle atrophy so common in aging.

The new findings support that view, but Srf doesn’t work in the way the researchers had anticipated. Srf was known to control many other genes within muscle fibres. That Srf also influences the activities of the satellite stem cells came as a surprise.

Mice with muscle fibers lacking Srf are no longer able to grow when they are experimentally overloaded, the new research shows. That’s because satellite cells don’t get the message to proliferate and fuse with those pre-existing myofibers.

Srf works through a network of genes, including one known as Cox2. That raises the intriguing possibility that commonly used Cox2 inhibitors - think ibuprofen - might work against muscle growth or recovery, Sotiropoulos notes. Treatments designed to tweak this network of factors might be used to wake muscle stem cells up and enhance muscle growth in circumstances such as aging or following long periods of bed rest, she said. Most likely, such therapies would be more successfully directed not at Srf itself, which has varied roles, but at its targets.

“It may be difficult to find a beneficial amount of Srf,” she said. “Its targets, interleukins and prostaglandins, may be easier to manipulate.”

- Macular.lastmed.com

Link between heart failure and diabetes

Either heart failure or diabetes alone is bad enough, but often times the two conditions seem to go together. Now, researchers reporting in the January Cell Metabolism appear to have found the culprit that leads from heart failure to diabetes and perhaps a novel way to break that metabolic vicious cycle.

“Our findings clarify the reasons why the incidence of heart failure is high among diabetic patients, why the prevalence of insulin resistance is increased in heart failure patients, and why treatment of insulin resistance improves the prognosis of heart failure patients,” said Tohru Minamino of Chiba University Graduate School of Medicine.

It’s a domino effect, the new evidence shows: the stress of heart failure activates the sympathetic nervous system. That stress response activates p53, which Minamino calls a cellular aging signal.

That p53 signal ultimately leads to inflammation in fat tissue, systemic insulin resistance, and worsening heart function.

Of course, the protein p53 is probably best known as a tumor suppressor.

“It has been reported that p53-dependent cellular aging is a protective mechanism for cancer development,” Minamino said. But, he adds, constant activation of the anticancer signal can promote inflammation, cancer, and other diseases of aging.

Minamino had earlier shown that age-associated or stress-induced accumulation of p53 in the heart promotes heart failure.

Aging and extra calories induce that same aging signal in fat tissue.

Now it seems that activation of cardiac p53 also leads to activation of p53 in fat tissue.

Those p53-dependent cellular aging signals in both tissues interact with each other, thereby accelerating the development of age-associated diseases, he said.

This suggests that an ideal treatment would block the inflammation that goes with p53’s activation without compromising its tumor-fighting abilities.

And for Minamino, that’s the Holy Grail: an antiaging therapy without the cancer risk.

- MNT