Answer to D. Böning's and J. M. Steinacker's Letter to the Editor “Problems with Doping in Scientific Articles?”

We appreciate the dedicated comments of the authors of the “Letter to the Editor”. As coauthors of some of the mentioned papers [9], [10], [11], [12], we strongly support their suggestion that clear rules regarding illegal offences should be included in the Journal's guidelines – in case such rules do not already exist. As a matter of course these regulations should be in force against any punishable or ethically unacceptable activity of authors.

Thus, rejection of manuscripts prior to publication seems formally easy. However, we should decide what to do with papers that have already been published. In the mentioned cases, the investigation of their employer, the University of Freiburg, has led to a termination of the scientific and academic career for the persons accused of doping practices.

As there was also extensive press coverage about the factual or even supposed personal participation in doping, we conclude that there is no additional need to inform the scientific community nor is there a need for the International Journal of Sports Medicine to personally penalize these scientists.

Much more important seems to be the consideration of any potential influence of the doping findings on the scientific interpretation and conclusions drawn from the published papers. Thereby, we should bear in mind that the frequency of doping manipulations is generally reported as quite high in professional sports, especially in road cycling. Doping has been reported frequently in the past also in other competitive sports (e.g., athletics, weight-lifting, or cross-country skiing). This implicates a certain likelihood of doping involvement for all subjects being tested in the field of sports – not even restricted to competitive athletes [8].

On the other hand, however, it is definitely unproven for the cited studies that any of the examined subjects de facto were involved in doping practices as D. Böning and J. Steinacker suggest in their argumentation. While hemoglobin mass is indeed a leading performance predictor in endurance exercise [1], [2], [4], [6], it is likely that any athlete with above-average performance has also an above-average hemoglobin mass. Several study groups are presently working on the introduction of hemoglobin mass measurements as an indication for doping [5], [7]. But only the time course is taken as relevant here, not the absolute values. Also, the V˙O_2max cited [2] is at a much lower level than it is reported for high-performance cyclists in general (78.8 ± 3.7 ml/kg · min) [3]. It must therefore be concluded that the mentioned reference [2] is from cyclists of a much lower performance capacity as in the studies of Vogt et al. [9], [10], [11], [12]. To use this fact as evidence for doping of individual subjects seems coherent to us only if every successful athlete is accused of doping. From the scientific point of view it is definitely not valid to accuse athletes of doping solely based on their absolute values of hemoglobin mass or subsequently on their exercise capacity. Furthermore, after discovering the subjects' identities, no specific subject tested in the mentioned papers of Vogt et al. was convicted of doping or has confessed to doping.

This issue describes not only our personal position but also the position of many colleagues in the field of Sports Medicine: scientific work and interpretation of athletes' data is not at any time certain to be free from an involvement in doping practices. Even if strictly against doping, a scientist can only exclude a possible involvement in doping by not including athletes in his scientific work. So, factual doping with potential influence on scientific results should be pointed out in the Journal, even if detected after the publication of a paper. It is also worth discussing whether a general statement should be included in every publication involving human subjects saying that no author can exclude influence of doping practices or any unknown manipulations on the results at any time.

K. Roecker, H.-H. Dickhuth

References

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