PEDs in MMA part 2: Analysis of DC & JJ’s bloods from UFC182

By request: UFC 182 Analysis:

NOTE: If you haven’t read my initial post on this topic then please do, as together each post should hopefully add to the understanding of the other.

Firstly, to help your understanding i have spent some time and organised the publicly available bloodwork results into these far more easily interpreted tables

In men, hormones are regulated by whats called the HPG Axis. This stands for the Hypothalamic – Pituitary – Gonadal axis. Here’s a picture if it helps This axis works like this: The hypothalamus secretes GnRH, the GnRH acts on the pituitary to secrete Leutenising Hormone aka LH, the LH enters circulation and acts on the Leydig cells of the testes which in turn causes them to release testosterone. LH levels are pretty steady in men; rising slightly with age but otherwise remaining quite stable. Here’s a table showing LH, FSH, and LH/FSH by age and gender.

So without further ado, let’s dive in! I highly suggest opening This table from earlier as well as this album of research data in new tabs, so that you can follow as I go through everything.

To start with, let’s establish the normal range for urinary LH in mIU/ml in healthy adult men, so that we can compare to DC and JJs results and see if theyre normal. The reason i think LH is such a good marker is because it is a part of a normally functioning sex hormone axis, so even if an athlete was using novel & undetectable compounds, LH would affected due to any exogenous androgens having a negative feedback effect on LH secretion.

Now that we’ve established that, let’s get analysing! In Fig 1, we can see that the average LH level in the 266 healthy men studied is around 2.4. In other studies i found, the normal range was about 1-10, and correlated strongly with normal testosterone production in the testes (Fig 2).

Now, before we go any further, I’d like to note something important: Most research dealing with LH levels is dealing with serum LH, that is, LH levels in the blood. As you’ll note however, the lab which tested these fighters – the Sports Medicine Research and Testing Laboratory aka SMRTL – is measuring the urinary LH concentrations. In order to better understand the relationship between serum lh and urinary lh, I had to delve deep into medical endocrinology journals, and luckily was able to find what I was looking for. The most helpful study that I found was looking into less-invasive methods of testing for hypogonadism and delayed puberty; you can check it out here however access to the full text will require payment or a university login; luckily however I’ve put the most relevant graph as Fig 3 in the album. This graph matches other studies I found, and shows a strong correlation between urinary LH and serum LH, determined by the equation: Urinary LH =0.37 + 1.63 times the Serum LH (r = 0.885,P , 0.001). Simplified, we can confidently apply this relationship to our aforementioned normal range in serum, to get a normal urinary LH range of approx 2 – 17 mIU/ml.

Fig 1 is taken from This study which also explains the following in regards to the results shown:

The upper limit of the present calculated normal range for LH (7.0 IU/L) is lower than that of published ranges. Moreover, the present range is much narrower than published ranges, presumably because the 266 subjects were uniformly fit, with few extremes of body proportions, as judged by the BMI. LH is secreted in a pulsatile fashion, and fluctuates more than does testosterone; in clinical practice it is recommended that three blood samples be drawn ª20 min apart, and pooled before assay [5,17,18]. The present narrow normal range is therefore the more striking, as it was based on single samples at each time point. Ranges derived from pooled samples would be expected to be even narrower.

What does this mean? basically, LH levels vary throughout the day however even with this variation, amongst 266 fit and healthy men their serum LH ranges always remained within the range of 0.7 to 7 mIU/ml. Converting serum values to urinary using the formula we derived above, we can say that even with diurnal variation, urinary LH in normal, healthy men does not generally exceed the range of 1.5 to 12 mIU/ml.

Now, with that established, let’s look at DC & JJ’s bloodwork. I’ve put each fighter’s comparison to the prior-established normal ranges in quotes, just to help readability.

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Not only does DC have an LH level of 46!!, but that level then drops down to 7.5 in the 2 weeks between Dec 17 and Jan 3. Considering that we established before that daily variations never exceed approx 10 mIU/ml, and only vary by ~0.1% as we get older each year, having a 40 mIU/ml swing in 2 weeks is….not normal. Variations in sample specific gravity (aka concentration aka hydration levels) can account for part of this, but by no means can it explain all of it.

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Moving onto JJ, we see him go from 16 to 3.4 in that same period. Urine concentration and time of day could actually account for this, however nothing would explain his first measurement of 0.5 mIU/ml LH – at that level, no un-enhanced person would be functioning properly, let alone able to complete a tough training camp.

Now lets establish a normal range for testosterone – Figs 4 and 5 show a helpful breakdown of testosterone ranges in the same units as our ufc 182 bloodwork. Fig 1 however is ultimately a better study IMO, as it accounts for time-of-day variations. Looking back at fig 1 then, we can see that with those variations, men under age 40 varied between 1.86 and 11.18 ug/L. Since ug/L is the same as ng/ml, we can say that in normal men under age 40 and accounting even for intra-day variations, testosterone generally remained in the range of 2-11 ng/ml. Figure 5 shows a broader range – 6.2 to 29.0 ng/ml; likely as the study accounted for fewer variables. Nonetheless let’s be generous and use the most extreme values from each study to compare to our old friends JJ & DC. We’ll say that the normal testosterone range is approx 2-29 ng/ml

DC’s test levels vary between 70 and 7.1; far greater than we’d normally expect. In addition, 70ng/ml is a huge value for someone in their late 30s who is 2weeks out from a fight at LHW and is very likely in the final stages of losing a large amount of fat. (something that normally crashes testosterone in healthy men)

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JJ on the other hand ranges from 0.5ng/ml (roflmao) to 16ng/ml, averaging about 5ng/ml. You don’t need me to tell you what’s wrong with that. We can also notice that since our urinary LH range is 1.5 to 12mIU/ml, and our testosterone range is 2-11ng/ml, we should expect the T/LH ratio in these units to at least somewhat approximate ~1. DC however gets as high as 1.73 T/LH ratio, and JJ gets as low as 0.31.

Finally, Fig 6 shows the urinary concentrations of Etiocholanone and Androsterone in young (25-31) and older (68-70) men. This graphs shows us that Andro levels range from 1.7 to 3.7 ug/ml, or 1700 to 3700 ng/ml. Etio levels on the other hand range from 4 to 8.5ug/ml, which equates to 4000 – 8500 ng/ml.

Dc’s Andro levels go from 5900 to 750 in the space of 2 weeks – impressively out of range for both the upper and lower limits. Nice. His Etio levels on the other hand go from 5100 to 590, only breaching the lower range.

JJ comparatively has Andro Levels that vary from 55 (rofl!) to 890; never coming close to the lower limit of 1700 in the study cited. His Etio levels by contrast go from 120 (bahaha) to 2000, again not even coming close to the lower limit.

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Now I’ve already spent far too long doing this post, (it has been fun tho) and im sure i haven’t been able to avoid making mistakes at some point. When it comes to making a conclusion however I will leave that up to you, the audience. The only insight I will offer here is that these results could potentially ( 😉 )suggest that DC & JJ are both taking PEDs but are approaching it in two contrasting ways: (Note: lots of conjecture here on my part*)

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DC may be supplementing with either LH or an LH analogue/secretagogue, which would account for his huge LH numbers and corresponding high Testosterone as well as explain the consistent relationship between his Etio, Andro, Test and LH values. It suggests to me that there is likely some supplementation going on, but that this supplementation occurs either downstream or at the level of the pituitary gland – for example, an LH secretagogue which stimulates overproduction of LH by the pituitary and a corresponding rise in Testosterone levels (and their metabolites).

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JJ on the other hand is suppressed as fuck; his bloods show suppressed LH, low testosterone, and low testosterone metabolites. His HPG (Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Gonadotropin) axis is completely suppressed, suggesting to me that he’s likely taking some form of novel, unknown-and-untestable-by-USADA compoud, which is acting on his androgen receptors and causing negative feedback right up his HPG axis.

That’s it, i’m exhausted, I’ll have to come back and fix up the undoubted numerous typos and other mistakes, but for now, I really have to get back to my own study.

If you made it this far I hope you’ve learned something, Take care and goodnight 🙂