aging

[SAFELIFE1 Banned Find all posts View Profile Close SAFELIFE1]

You see test replacement more and more on tv. It says ask your family doctor.

[RonnyT Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close RonnyT]

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Thank you guys for participating in this subject. In the new site we'll make a special forum dedicated to aging, anti-aging, HRT, rejunivation etc. Feedback is very important, because your stories inspirate other older guys, like you and me to stay informed.

Men experiencing a mid-life crisis perk up after a six-week course of testosterone injections. New York psychiatrists describe the effects in a study published recently in the Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology.

The researchers recruited 23 healthy but slightly depressed men in their late forties and early fifties through newspaper ads. The men had been feeling less than on top of the world for four years. They were suffering from dysthymic disorder, the technical name for midlife crisis, something three to ten percent of all men experience. Many deal with the problem by buying a flashy sports car or an equally flashy suede jacket, but the researchers decided to try an alternative remedy: Schering?s Testoviron Depot.

Schering?s Testoviron has contained testosterone enanthate since the good old days of Adolf Hitler, but the psychiatrists used a special version of Testoviron. It came from Schering?s enchanted forest where the elves fill the Testoviron ampoules with testosterone cypionate instead of testosterone enanthate.
Or the psychiatrists just couldn?t be bothered to read the label on the box. That?s also possible of course.
Half of the men were given an injection containing 200 milligrams of testosterone ester every ten days for six weeks. During the trial the psychiatrists assessed their subjects using the HamiltonDepression Rating Scale. The men were asked 21 questions and the answers were used to determine how depressed they were. The higher the score, the more depressed you are. The figure below shows the effect of the testosterone on the men?s scores.

The treatment did not work on all the men. Just over half of the testosterone users obtained relief from depression. Only ten percent of the placebo users recovered.
The researchers stress that their study results should not be seen as a green light for pumping depressed men full of testosterone. ?This 6-week study did not permit assessment of possible longer-term risks of testosterone administration, such as gynecomastia, or the potential for worsening the course of prostate cancer.?
Source:
J Clin Psychopharmacol. 2009 Jun;29(3):216-21

[RonnyT Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close RonnyT]

anti-E

Getting older? Take anti-oestrogens with your testosterone
As men age they start to react even less well to synthetic testosterone [structural formula shown below] than endocrinologists thought. According to a study done by the manufacturer of ProStrakan/Fortigel testosterone gel, soon to be published in the Journal of Andrology, exogenous testosterone causes a stronger reduction in the body's own production of testosterone the older you get.


Older men?s bodies (say 50 and up) react more strongly to testosterone than the bodies of younger men. If you give older men testosterone injections, their cholesterol levels get worse than those in younger men. [J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2005 Feb;90(2):678-88.] What?s more, the concentration of the prostate cancer protein PSA increases more than in young men, and the blood of older men becomes more syrupy as a result of testosterone than the blood of young men. [J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2008 Mar;93(3):914-9.] As a result, the chance of heart attacks increases. Oh yes, and the positive effects of testosterone, such as muscle build up, are less noticeable in older men than in young men.
In the study, 35 men aged between 22 and 73 with a raised LH level and low testosterone were given Fortigel testosterone gel for two weeks consecutively. Every morning they rubbed 3 g gel, which contained 2 percent testosterone, on their legs. The table below shows that after two weeks the older men had less total free testosterone in their systems than the younger men. That?s logical: the older men get, the more SHBG binding protein they make. SHBG neutralises testosterone.



Nevertheless the older men?s natural production of testosterone suffered more when they used the testosterone gel than that of the younger men. Below you can see the effect of the gel on the LH level, according to age. LH is a hormone from the pituitary that tells the testes to produce testosterone.



The researchers also measured the concentration of estradiol in their subjects? blood. When they measured the correlation between the amount of estradiol and the LH level they made a very interesting discovery: the concentration of testosterone didn?t correlate negatively with the LH level ? but the concentration of estradiol did.



It?s pretty clear what that means: give anti-oestrogens to older men who are taking testosterone supplements as well and the problem is solved.
Testosterone gels are not used much in the chemical power sports world. Nevertheless, the findings are also interesting for chemical athletes who use stronger stuff than gels. The study makes it clear that anti-oestrogens are useful to chemical athletes as they get older.
Source:
J Androl. 2009 Dec 3. [Epub ahead of print].