"Patricio Carlos" <
[email protected]> wrote in message
news:
[email protected]...
> Regardless of your & Tom's high natural hct, the normal range is such
> that very few people are like you. Having a high natural hct doesn't
> make you an elite athlete and not having a high hct doesn't preclude
> you from becoming one.
>
> 50 would have been picked because it is unusual for anyone (including
> elite endurance athletes even with altitude training) to have that
> without "assistance". It is not to say it is impossible - as you and
> Cunego show - just that is is rare.
Acording to Williams Hematology the standard blood hematocrit is 46% with
the NORMAL variances between 42 and 50. Much smaller portions of the
population can have natural hematocrits above or below these expected
limits.
And there are a number of conditions which can cause errors in automated
hematocrit measuring that can cause errors up to 6% or more.
As I noted before, high level endurance training causes the total blood
volume to elevate faster than the erythroytes can be manufactured in the
body. However, this higher blood volume has a total RBC count higher than
the higher measured hematocrit in non-athletes and can deliver more oxygen
and scavenge more waste products from the body (which may be more
important).
Because the largest percentage of liquid loss in dehydration is from the
blood when both hematocrit and total blood volume are high measuring over
the 50% limit would be something that perhaps half or more of the peleton
would do were blood samples taken AFTER a race instead of before.
It is my ASSUMPTION that the UCI has made it so difficult for athletes to
get permission to have hematocrits elevated above 50% that in order to stay
within the rules it is simply easier for team doctors to infuse liquids to
obtain 'legal' hematocrit levels. After all, infusing saline is so common
that there were more than a dozen in the medical examination area of the USA
Junior Road Racing championships race in Texas a number of years back after
a relatively trying test on a hot day that was absolutely NOTHING like a
hard day in the Alps. So I believe that although it isn't talked about much,
saline infusion is common almost to the point of being SOP.
If so you might as well kill two birds with one stone and correct the
hematocrit at the same time.