As part of the International Congress of Clinical Chemistry, a symposium, Doping in Sport: Misuse, Analytical Tests, and Legal Aspects, was held, a week before the start of the Olympic Games at Atlanta, bringing together a number of international experts concerned with various aspects of controlling drug abuse in sport. The presentations focused particularly on anabolic-androgenic steroids (AAS), these analytes still comprising the greatest number of positive findings in samples tested by International Olympic Committee (IOC)-accredited sports drug-testing laboratories. Although various aspects of AAS use and detection have been reported on in the last decade, the proceedings of this symposium, published in this issue of Clinical Chemistry, bring together health, social, endocrine, and analytical perspectives in a widely read peer-reviewed journal. Those who think that the harmful effects of AAS administration are relatively benign and perhaps should not be banned by the IOC may find particularly sobering the article by Franke and Berendonk [1], which describes the health and social consequences of the clandestine state-sponsored program of administration of AAS in the former East Germany. This article should be extremely useful for educational purposes and, we hope, will encourage some present users to abandon the practice. The mechanism of action of AAS is still not well understood, and the article by Wu [2] is a useful update. Catlin et al. [3] discuss the pertinent issues of detecting AAS administration, in particular of testosterone (T), which is commonly abused. Stenman et al. [4] give a clinical chemistry perspective on the problems of detecting human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) by immunoassay, the protein hormone that may be used by competitors to stimulate testicular production of T. Bowers [5] discusses analytical advances to detect performance-enhancing compounds, particularly with reference to xenobiotic AAS and peptide hormones, such as hCG.
