A new study finds that athletes may be able to evade getting caught in dope tests if they have a genetic variant that is common in East Asians.
Athletes with a slightly different expression of the same gene, by contrast, run the risk of being falsely accused of doping, said the study.
The standard test in professional and amateur sports for uncovering illicit testosterone use measures the ratio of two chemicals in the urine.
The level of testosterone glucuronide (TG), a by-product of testosterone in the body, is compared to the level of epitestosterone glucuronide (EG), which remains constant even when the power-boosting hormone is injected into the blood stream.
Any ratio above four-to-one is seen as suspect, according to the International Olympic Committee.
But depending on how many copies one has of a gene known as UGT2B17, the results of the test can vary by 20-fold, allowing drug cheaters to go undetected or yielding "false positives" for clean athletes.
A team of researchers led by Jenny Jakobsson at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm injected 55 male volunteers with 500-milligrammes of testosterone enanthate, a substance banned by virtually all sports federations.
The subjects were divided into three groups, depending on whether they had one, two or no copies of UGT2B17.
More than 40 percent of the men who had no copies of the gene showed testosterone levels within permissible bounds in daily urine tests over the next 15 days despite having taken a large dose of a banned substance.