Indirect biomarkers of illegal anabolic treatments: Five years of activity under the microscope

Histopathological techniques in the field of public health is based on the possibility of identifying, with relatively low costs and in a short time, morphological and functional alterations in target organs due to the illegal use of anabolic molecules. In order to better understand the effects of anabolic drugs on the morphology of organs and tissues of veal calves, many experimental treatments have been performed from 2001 to 2004, using natural and synthetic sex hormones. In the same time, several samples of target organs have been collected and analyzed from regularly slaughtered calves from the practice. Nearby the standard histological methods, lectins have been satisfy applied to identify minimal lesions, particularly to better characterize what we thought was the initial step of squamous metaplasia.