Reliability of Drug History to Verify Androgen Abuse in Men

Context: Clinical evaluations that require excluding androgen abuse, a secretive, illicit activity, rely on the drug history, but its veracity for androgen abuse has neither been verified nor has any objective corroborating laboratory test been validated.

Objective: In a high-risk population, to (a) validate the drug history of androgen abuse objectively using state-of-the-art World Anti-Doping Agency-accredited antidoping laboratory urine mass spectrometry tests and (b) to determine what biochemical tests best distinguish androgen abuse from nonuse in this population.

Methods: Urine samples from current (n = 41) and past (n = 31) androgen abusers and nonusers (n = 21) were analyzed by comprehensive mass spectrometry-based detection tests for androgens and related drugs (ARD).

Results: No prohibited ARDs were identified among nonusers. Current users had a median of 5 (range 1-13) drugs detected comprising 176 ARDs among 220 drug identifications. Past users had a median of 1 (range 0-9) drugs detected comprising 21 ARDs among 43 drugs. Negative predictive value was high (>0.8) for those denying drug usage while positive predictive value was good (>0.6) for both those reporting currently using (current) and not using (nonusers plus past users) ARD. Serum luteinizing hormone (LH) alone had high, but imperfect, discriminatory power (89%) to distinguish between current and noncurrent androgen use.

Conclusions: We demonstrates that a negative drug history in a high-risk group has high reliability and that even a single suppressed serum LH exhibits high discrimination for objectively detecting androgen abuse.