EPO and the athlete biological passport: Hematological results from a placebo‐controlled, boosting and microdose EPO administration in male recreational athletes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Hematological results in the context of the Athlete Biological Passport (ABP) from a placebo-controlled EPO administration study are provided here. Twelve participants administered eight subcutaneous boosting doses of epoetin alfa (at 40 IU/kg) over the course of 20 days. After a 10-day washout period, the same volunteers administered six microdoses (900 IU), intravenously, over 13 days. A blinded placebo cohort followed the same dosing pattern, administering saline instead of EPO. All participants supplemented with oral iron, daily, throughout the entirety of the study. In the EPO cohort, as expected, significant changes from baseline were identified in IRF, RET#, RET%, RDW, HCT, HGB, and RBC. No meaningful changes were identified in the placebo cohort population. From the ABP perspective, atypical passport findings (ATPF) were identified in 49% of the samples collected during the boosting and initial washout phases, and 24% of the samples during the microdosing and final washout phases. ATPFs from this cohort were flagged as late as Day 70, the final day of the study. Only a single ATPF was identified from all samples collected from the placebo cohort. ABPs from all volunteers in the study are provided as an avenue to visually convey differences in magnitude and timing of the hematological changes caused by EPO on the individual level. These data are expected to provide important content for Athlete Passport Management Units and ABP expert panels alike.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".