Why is propranolol banned

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Knowledge awaits. See Subscription Options Already a subscriber? Create Account See Subscription Options. Continue reading with a Scientific American subscription. A study investigated beta-blockers' effectiveness on SAT performance for 32 students who had test anxiety.

When given beta-blockers an hour before taking the SAT for the second time, the study found, the students scored an average points higher than their drug-free first round. The normal increase would be about 30 points out of 1, total, the paper said.

Beta-blockers have stirred up controversy in the sports world. The World Anti-Doping Agency listed them as a performance enhancer in and currently bans their use in 18 sports, from billiards to archery. In the first major doping scandal of the Beijing Olympics, North Korean pistol shooter Kim Jong-su was stripped of his silver and bronze medals after testing positive for the beta-blocker propranolol. And last spring, Swedish wheelchair curler Glenn Ikonen was suspended for taking metoprolol at the Paralympics in Vancouver.

Golfers have been rumored to use beta-blockers to sharpen their focus and precision for putting. The PGA Tour banned beta-blocker usage in because "it decreases tremors and steadies nerves, which could give a competitive advantage," says spokeswoman Ana Leaird. Musicians say many students choose to use the drugs more to calm themselves than intensify their playing.

Chang, who says she has never used beta-blockers but is now considering them after a shaky debut performance last year. Kontorovitch, who says she has been diagnosed for performance anxiety, has been taking beta-blockers occasionally for nine years - and no longer performs without them.

Though she has been playing piano since she was 5, the year-old vocal accompanist at the Bienen School in Evanston, Ill. The thought of not being able to go back and fix mistakes makes me lose it.

And Narang was duly called for a urine test moments after he won bronze in the 10m air rifle event at the London Olympics. Those tests though, sometimes provide quirky anecdotes.

Narang goes further to recite another such incident, back at the Nationals in Hyderabad. It took me so long to give the sample that he almost missed the train. For long, there has been no cause for shooters to worry. But there are strong checks in place. Any Athlete showing signs of intoxication with alcohol or other drugs shall immediately be expelled from a shooting range.

But control and self-discipline is the basic fundamental of shooting. These are values that have extended to what a shooter does outside of the sport as well. I interpret that it was a deliberate intake because of the importance it has in that sport. The consequences are obvious. Kim's positive test was the second of these Games after the Spanish road cyclist Maria Isabel Moreno was stripped of her Olympic accreditation on Tuesday.

The IOC also declared a third incident, involving the 59th-ranked artistic gymnast Thi Ngan Thuong Do, from Vietnam, who was found to have taken the diuretic furocemide and also expelled from the Games. Ljunqvist had more sympathy for Thi, whose drug test was for a substance that is used to control pre-menstrual tension.