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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Five-time Grand Slam champion Maria Sharapova [wikipedia.org] has announced that she failed a drug test at the Australian Open [npr.org]. She will be provisionally suspended starting March 12th, according to the Tennis Anti-Doping Programme [twitter.com].

She claimed that she had used the substance meldonium [wikipedia.org] (also known as Mildronate) for the past 10 years to treat "signs of diabetes", but failed to click on a link in an Dec. 22, 2015 email from the World Anti-Doping Agency about the changes to the 2016 prohibited list [itftennis.com], which included moving meldonium from the monitoring program to the prohibited list due to "evidence of its use by athletes with the intention of enhancing performance".

Meldonium is an anti-ischemic drug widely used in the Russian Federation, and one of Latvia's top exports. From Wikipedia:

Meldonium is clinically used to treat angina and myocardial infarction. The first clinical trial testing the efficacy of using a combination of meldonium and lisinopril, an angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor, to treat chronic heart failure was reported in 2005. The report concluded that the combined treatment of meldonium and lisinopril may improve the quality of life, exercise capacity and mechanisms of peripheral circulation of patients with chronic heart failure. A later report in 2008 concluded that combined meldonium-lisinopril treatment improved carotid baroreceptor reflex in patients with chronic heart failure.

[...] Using animal models, the applications of meldonium, sometimes in tandem with other drugs such as metformin, have shown beneficial effects on neurological disorder and diabetes. Meldonium may also be beneficial for the treatment of seizures and alcohol intoxication. Recent reports also suggest that meldonium may improve the ability of learning and memory, as the drug changes the expression of hippocampal proteins related to synaptic plasticity using rat model. Meldonium was reported to elevate the concentrations of γ-butyrobetaine hydroxylase in testes tissues; in addition, long term (90 days) administration of meldonium was reported to improve sexual performance, sperm motility and concentration of testosterone in boars, although further studies are needed to confirm the potential of using meldonium as a sperm motility and sperm quality-enhancing agent.

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