Assay of Human Chorionic Gonadotropin in Urine of Athletes and Evaluation of Assay Kit Performance

Special attention has been paid to human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) for athlete doping control because it stimulates the endogenous production of testosterone and epitestosterone without increasing the T/E ratio which is a doping indicator for the exogenous administration of testosterone. Even though the IOC banned the use of hCG. a detection method has not been decided upon since there are a variety of immunoassay kits available on the market. We evaluated three kits in terms af their performance characteristics. (omitted)