Investigations of anabolic drug abuse in athletics and cattle feed. II. Specific determination of methandienone (Dianabol) in urine in nanogram amounts.

A high-performance liquid chromatographic method for the determination of the free excreted anabolic drug methandienone in pharmacokinetic studies is described. After extraction of the free steroids from urine, separation on reversed-phase columns leads to quantitative determination of this drug down to 5 ng, and to qualitative detection of less than 1 ng amounts. Because the anabolic drugs and their metabolites are eluted later than the other normally excreted constituents this method is also useful for the routine surveillance of anabolic drug abuse in the sports in general.