Profiling medicines containing anabolic steroids by electronic circular dichroism and infrared spectroscopies

Anabolic androgenic steroids play a key role in many important biological processes in human body. One of them is the control and enhancement of muscle growth, and, for this reason, they are closely connected with doping in professional sport. Various steroid-containing preparations have also become popular among amateur sportsmen and bodybuilders as their availability is highly facilitated by an easy access to the Internet, where they can be bought easily and anonymously. Preparations from such unofficial sources, however, can have uncertain composition, and their excessive usage may be harmful to health. It is thus important to seek reliable and fast analytical approaches for the identification and profiling of steroid-containing samples from various suspicious sources to be able to efficiently fight the illegal spread of potentially life-threatening preparations. In the presented work, a combination of two IR spectroscopy techniques and electronic circular dichroism (ECD) was used to analyse several medicines from various unofficial Internet sources and police seizures that allegedly contained anabolic steroids. It turned out that this relatively cheap, user-friendly and fast framework enabled an interesting and reliable tool for the preliminary classification of suspicious pharmaceutical samples in forms of tablets and oil solutions. While IR spectroscopy is often used in forensic practice, application of ECD presents a new interesting approach that advantageously complements the information about the analysed samples, for instance the absolute configuration of the active substances.