Aragon wrote:
Before you quote the Sgrò et al paper too much because the word "elite" is mentioned, checking out what Wilkerson and his coauthors wrote in their "smoking gun" sentence in the 2005 paper is always not too much demanded:
A 22% increase in time to exhaustion at a constant work rate is equivalent to a ∼1–2% improvement in time trial performance over an equivalent distance (Hopkins et al. 1999). This is similar to the effect predicted by Birkeland et al. (2000) and translates into a reduction in the time to run 1500 m of ∼3 s in an elite athlete, an effect that is certainly likely to be meaningful.
While I tend not to put too much value on estimates, from the paragraph above it is far from clear whether the researchers even claim that the results from 47.5 Vo2Max subjects can be extrapolated to elite level athletes or whether they just want to give more understandable context about the magnitude of the TTE change when their 3-4 minute test is translated to actual speed improvement.
The reference in the Sgrò paper that rHuEPO "seems to be able to increase sub maximal more than maximal aerobic parameters" appears to have been mainly based on 2007 paper titled Prolonged administration of recombinant human erythropoietin increases submaximal performance more than maximal aerobic capacity in which Vo2Max increased only by 13 % after rHuEPO administration whereas the subjects rode 54 % longer on a submaximal time-to-exhaustion test at 80 % intensity. While I can't locate the source, I can recall one physiologist/commentator commenting that it is customary that TTE protocols translate to time-trial speed at coefficients of 10-15, so the 54 % improvement would be around 3-5 % in speed which wouldn't be extraordinarily high when compared to the change in Vo2Max.
I don't have a dog in either of the fights and the Sgrò et al paper is an interesting look into the literature and on the trends of present and future research. But please don't use the fancy word "meta-analysis" to describe it time-and-time again because it is a review and you don't appear to know what you are talking about.
If you want a meta-analysis on rHuEPO, here is one from the Netherlands where there is data from multiple of sources and there is some fancy statistical analysis conducted.
Bullsh*t you don't have a dog in this fight! Aren't you the guy who believes LA didn't blood dope in his 09 Tour comeback? As I said before you're not fooling me...you have delusions of grandeur. You spend time debating this stuff over on "The Clinic," and then like a shark who senses blood, you always get confrontational and overbearing everytime I post a study with your holier-than-thou pretentious attitude. I post Malm et al and highlight the estimations and you act like a wiseass calling me out on it! I post Sgrò et al today, and you do the same BS! You have no background whatsoever in this field (remember you're a self-admitted computer tech) but you seem obsessed as masquerading as some research scientist trying to impress everyone that you can read & critique studies. BFD - most everyone on these doping threads can read the studies also. You really don't know everything like you think you do! Delusions of grandeur!