Relation between Exercise Performance and Blood Storage Condition and Storage Time in Autologous Blood Doping

Professional athletes are expected to continuously improve their performance, and some might also use illegal methods—e.g., autologous blood doping (ABD)—to achieve improvements. This article applies a systematic literature review to investigate differences in the ABD methods and the related performance and blood parameters owing to different storage conditions—cryopreservation (CP) and cold storage (CS)—and different storage durations. The literature research resulted in 34 original articles. The majority of currently published studies employed CS during ABD. This contrasts to the applied storage technique in professional sports, which was mainly reported to be CP. The second outcome of the literature research revealed large differences in the storage durations applied, which were in the range of one day to 17 weeks between blood sampling and re-infusion, which might affect recovery of the red blood cell mass and thus performance outcome related to ABD. Data revealed that performance parameters were positively affected by ABD when a minimal storage duration of four weeks was adhered. This article identified a need for further research that reflect common ABD practice and its real effects on performance parameters, but also on related blood parameters in order to develop valid and reliable ABD detection methods.