Drug testing is about to move into the 21st century for horseracing. Research findings at the University of Kentucky’s Gluck Equine Research Center could make the use of urine in post-race drug testing a thing of the past within a very short time. Urine has been the body fluid of choice in drug testing because the horse’s kidney concentrates whatever is in the blood. Therefore, every drug in the horse’s system is concentrated at least 50-fold by the kidney, and fluid (urine) is excreted in a large volume for sampling. The disadvantages are that urine testing relates poorly to blood concentration and drugs sometimes be found for a long time in urine.

Blood is a much more satisfactory medium, but the concentrations of drug are much smaller. This makes detection and quantitation more challenging. An ideal method would be highly sensitive and specific and require only a small volume of sample.

This method now has arrived.

New liquid chromatography mass spectrometry mass spectrometry (LC-MS-MS) offers an exquisitely sensitive test to laboratories. The new testing equipment, while expensive, is highly specific, very sensitive, and virtually eliminates background readings of “other” substances that might confuse results