Good article re: the (im)possibility that Tyler’s wife is right 
I still don’t understand why you would use some one else’s blood instead of your own. Any one have insight?
I think it’s because there is a dip in performance while your body replaces the blood taken out. You’d have to ask around the cross-country skiing forums in Finland. They have this stuff down to a science.
Exactly - it takes several weeks for your body to replace the RBCs taken out (depending of course on how much was taken). During that time you’s have to train at a lower intesnsity.
Only an athlete with a very long off season can use his own blood.
I guess you can’t store it for a while…like freeze it? (except WADA)
I thought blood packing originally was from a person’s own blood?
I am not an expert at this, but I think that in order to store it you need to separate the red blood cells from the rest.
Other top cyclists like Jan Ulrich?
Floyd Landis?
It takes 6-8 wks for your body to replace a unit of blood so you will have that long ot a slump in training intensity.
We had a patient recently that had a Hb of 17.9 and a Hct of 52.7, AND was hypervolemic! Most people presenting with these numbers are hypovolemic. They would have been considered to be over the limit on a screening blood test for a race. Turns out this person was a heavy smoker with heart disease, and this was the body’s way of compensating for the problems those conditions cause. This person could have self-donated, but, I’ll bet they couldn’t race very well.
Good points about storage times of blood and it’s components…the different components have different storage shelf-lives. But, you’d probably want to try and just re-infuse the packed red blood cells (which contains some of the heavier platelets, some plasma, and leukocytes). You could do yourself a bigger favor by washing the PRBC’s (in a cell-saver or centrifuge device) to eliminate some of the accumulated wastes and cells that have ruptured during storage, not to mention the calcium-binding anticoagulant, and then even run the whole shebang through a leukocyte-reducing filter to remove as many of the WBC’s as possible. You just want the intact red blood cells. Oh, yeah, you’d also do a good thing to replenish the 2,3, DPG that gets depleted when the cells have been stored…2,3 DPG is important in how it affects the Oxyhemoglobin dissociation curve.
But, don’t ask me how “they” do it. “They” referring to athletes that actually do this, but, it ain’t hard to do.
I read somewhere that the main reason people don’t self-donate is because (like you said) it takes a couple of weeks to replace the RBC, which in turn hurts training.
The other reason is that it’s hard to get a packet of blood through airports and such. It needs to stay chill and moving it from country to country is hard. If it’s another person’s blood he carries it for you (in his body) until you need to use it.
…so ideally, your twin brother comes along with you to “spectate” races and “tops you up” every three weeks or so. In the interim, he eats lots of steak and iron laden foods…
Lance could easily self donate. He is “off season” more then he is “on” and after his cancer treatment he would have good working knowledge of epo, if he cared to speed it up that way.
ceitsab