Effect of Increased Pain Tolerance on Exercise Performance

• Status: Completed
• Trial end date: 2019-03-07
• Target enrollment: 0
• Participant gender: Male

Summary

Clinical prescription and use of opioids is a clear problem in large parts of the world and has the recent years received an increasing publicity in sports. This is in particular due to the World Anti-Doping Agency monitoring list, which reveal that endurance athletes utilize the opioid Tramadol frequently with the aim to enhance performance according to anecdotal evidence.

Studies investigating the effect of tramadol on exercise performance in healthy humans is limited to one study in moderate trained subjects. However, this effect may be different in highly trained subjects due to the effects of chronic exercise. Furthermore, ingestion of tramadol may impact motor-cognitive performance and it remains unknown whether tramadol can be detected in highly trained subjects following exercise.

In the present study the investigators apply a randomized double-blind placebo-controlled counterbalanced cross-over design to investigate whether tramadol treatment improves a preloaded cycling time trial performance, whether it affects motor-cognitive performance and whether it is detectable following exercise.

• Phase: N/A
• Accepts Healthy Volunteers?: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Details

• Lead Sponsor: University of Copenhagen
• Collaborators: Anti Doping Danmark; Oslo University Hospital
• Treatments: Tramadol

Criteria

Inclusion Criteria:

• Maximal oxygen uptake < 55 ml O2/min/kg

• Plasma creatinine concentration between 60-105 umol/L

• Plasma alanine aminotransferase between 10-70 U/L

• Familiarized with endurance training for at least a few years

Exclusion Criteria:

• Donated blood within the last 3 months

• Exposed to an altitude greater than 1000 m above sea level within the last two months

• Smoking