Jenny Schulze has for many years researched the biological passport used as a screening, or perhaps rather as a warning flag, in blood and steroid doping.

Today she works at the control activities at Swedish Anti-Doping.

- We have just done a study to check on the individual variation in women, but more studies are needed and it is difficult to get permission to give male sex hormone to women, says Jenny Schulze.

The steroid workout, which should therefore alert when an athlete shows deviating values, is designed for men. Unlike women, they have a steady flow of steroids into the urine, while women have much greater variations. This, in turn, means that the female values ​​in the steroid pass can vary much more before the system warns.

However, it is not impossible to detect women who have added synthetic testosterone, ie steroids, but it is required that someone suspect and pass the doping test on.

- When you suspect something, you send that sample to an isotope analysis, because artificial testosterone has a different composition than your own, it has a different isotope ratio. This analysis means that one hundred people can say whether someone has doped with testosterone or not, but it costs five times more and takes a very long time for the lab, so we can't send all the samples there, just the ones we suspect.

Would the dream be to send all samples on isotope analysis?

- The steroid pass is extremely sensitive to variations, but it is clear that it would be desirable that the analysis was not so inefficient but had a higher capacity.

And the fact remains. The design of the steroid passport and the problem of researching women and male sex hormone leave a window open for women who wish to add synthetic testosterone.

- Yes, in small doses of steroid doping it should be easier to get away as a woman, but with that said, we will send all deviations on an isotope analysis. In addition, we now have this study where we will have the opportunity to see what the steroid workout looks like when women are doping with testosterone so we should do that, says Jenny Schulze.

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