2024 · Frontiers in sports and active living · open access
The use of saliva and blood progesterone to profile the menstrual cycles of youth professional football players
Ferrer et al.
The finding, in our words
In young elite footballers with regular cycles, salivary progesterone correlated strongly with capillary blood concentrations, offering a non‑invasive way to track ovarian function. A luteal‑phase saliva progesterone threshold of 50 pg/ml and a 1.5‑fold rise over follicular baseline showed good accuracy for confirming ovulation against serum criteria.
A paraphrase to the Library’s standard, never the abstract. The source is one link away and is always the authority.
Capillary fingerstick sampling showed high correlation and agreement with venous sampling for serum AMH but with proportional bias, so it may improve access to testing yet should not be considered fully interchangeable without further validation.
Home DBS sampling gave testosterone results that agreed well with venous blood in men on intramuscular testosterone undecanoate, but showed falsely high values in those using topical gel, likely from skin contamination. Patients preferred home collection for its convenience, suggesting DBS is viable for decentralised monitoring of injectable testosterone if patients are taught proper technique.
Earlobe capillary microsampling of 100-250 µL found good agreement with venous draws for progesterone, concordance 0.911, and 17β-estradiol, concordance 0.919, across menstrual cycles, showing suitability for decentralised monitoring. However, participant-reported burden was not assessed, and further validation is required in elite athletes.
In 46 women under hormone monitoring at Columbia University Fertility Center, oestradiol, LH, FSH, progesterone and hCG measured on routine immunoassays from 400 to 600 microlitres of upper-arm capillary blood collected with TAP Micro Select agreed closely with paired venous results for every analyte, with correlation and concordance high throughout. It is the evidence that puts a self-collected sample inside the daily monitoring of an IVF cycle.
This study found that dried blood spot samples stored at room temperature for four years correlated highly with serum measurements for testosterone and androstenedione, indicating that hematocrit adjustment may be unnecessary for serial monitoring in home-based self-sampling.