Thread: Ingredients in fake dianabol heart-shaped tablets uncovered

Ingredients in fake dianabol heart-shaped tablets uncovered

If you belong to the tribe of pharmacologically assisted bodybuilders then you'll be familiar with the heart-shaped dianabol tablets. The genuine ones, going by what you read on forums and blogs, are made by March Pharmaceuticals, but there are also fake ones in circulation. Thanks to researchers at the University of Padova we now know what these contain too.


In the Journal of Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Analysis the researchers recount that they analysed pills they obtained from the police. The police had confiscated the pills after a street check using sniffer dogs. The hearts are shown in the photo below.

Some of the readers of this website will recognise the tablets immediately. They look remarkably similar to the heart-shaped tablets that are supposed to contain dianabol. There is no consensus about their quality. If you Google something like heartshaped+dianabol+real+fake, then you'll see what we're getting at.



The researchers initially assumed that the tablets would contain amphetamines or XTC, but the standard tests did not reveal these drugs. So the Italians ground up a few tabs, extracted any active ingredients using methanol and then analysed these using GC-MS.



The results are shown below: the heart-shaped tablets contained two different substances.






Both were anabolic steroids: methandienone [that's dianabol] and methyltestosterone. The tablets contained on average 1.5 mg dianabol and 1.7 mg methyltestosterone. In all the tablets they analysed the Italians found a 1:1 ratio between the methyltestosterone and the dianabol [structural formulae of both are shown at the top of the page]. Because there are no registered substances with this composition, the researchers assume they are dealing with a forgery.

And a bad forgery at that. The heart-shaped fakes contain just enough of an active ingredient to give users the idea that their steroids are working, but not enough to build up muscle in the doses recommended.
When color fails: Illicit blue tablets containing anabolic androgen steroids.

The necessity of specific, confirmatory tests in the identification of seized illicit products was highlighted by the analysis of eighteen heart shaped, blue tablets confiscated by Police at a street control in the North East of Italy. The tablets responded as amphetamines to a preliminary color test (Marquis); a subsequent, confirmatory assay by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry revealed the presence of two anabolic androgen steroids (AAS), methandienone and methyltestosterone, in concentration of 1.7 and 1.5mg respectively per tablet; no trace of amphetamine-like or nitrogen containing compounds was found. The observed orange coloration was due to the reaction of concentrated sulphuric acid, contained in the Marquis reagent, with the Δ(4) C-3 keto group of steroids. The two AAS, banned under the world antidoping code, are not considered as psychoactive drugs of abuse in most countries, although their trafficking may entangle severe public health concerns.

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http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23770638