Our first episode is going to be on men’s health and how your hormonal changes affect your overall health. Many people hear about testosterone affecting your lean body mass, energy, sexual function. But what makes me most interested in testosterone and hormone replacement in men is the incredible positive medical and medical and health effects that testosterone has. Many of the studies that have been done in Harvard University and Baylor University have found that things such as Alzheimer’s disease, heart disease, blood pressure, and diabetes, are all affected positively … by taking testosterone. Testosterone is a hormone that’s created within the testes. It’s controlled by the pituitary gland in the brain. The important effects of testosterone are as follows: In the brain, it’s linked … Alzheimer’s disease is linked to low testosterone. Increased muscle size and strength are all affected positively by testosterone. Testosterone also reduces body fat and mostly in the gut. It also prevents osteoporosis, and it has a decreased risk of heart disease when people are on testosterone.
Andropause, andropause is what we call male menopause. Some people call it ‘manopause’. It does exist. It affects approximately 25 million men between the ages of 35 to 55, and andropause is caused by low testosterone levels. The effects, as you can see on the slide, include increased belly fat, decreased mental sharpness, low libido, depression, sleep problems, irritability, muscle loss, and erectile dysfunction. This slide linked to estrogen is a very important slide because we have to understand that testosterone, which of course is the male hormone, is greatly linked to estrogen in the male body. So men do have estrogen in their system, and the fact is, is that sometimes your testosterone will lower and you will increase your estrogen levels. So as you could see, things such as on this list, belly fat, low vitamin D, alcohol, stress, increase stress hormone, and high insulin can all convert your testosterone into estrogen.
And the reason why this is important is that when you have elevated estrogen levels, and sometimes estrogen levels are caused by abdominal fat, which often is caused originally by low testosterone. When you have low testosterone, you … increase your abdominal fat because you decrease your lean body mass. So when you have abdominal fat, you increase estrogen. And what we’re finding now in the current research is that estrogen is actually the cause of prostate cancer and not testosterone. And we’re gonna talk a lot about that … in the upcoming slides. But if you have increased abdominal fat, you’re actually increasing your estrogen, which is even lowering your testosterone even more. So this is a vicious cycle. The vicious cycle is when you have low testosterone, it’s going to increase your body fat, which decreases your muscle mass, which in turn produces more estrogen. And when you have more estrogen, it’s going to ultimately, again, decrease your testosterone even more. So this cycle produces more and more problems. But more importantly, when you have high estrogen levels, again, you’re increasing your risk of diabetes, cancer, and heart disease. And lower testosterone does …
Alzheimer’s disease was studied in the University of Hong Kong. What they found is they found 153 men who were … were diagnosed as pre-Alzheimer’s disease, meaning that they were not fully … had the disease, but they were about to. So with these men, they also found that these men also had low testosterone. What they did was they gave all of these men testosterone. And out of the 153 that got testosterone, only 10 developed full-blown Alzheimer’s disease. Another study was done in Wayne State University in 2004, and what they found is that there’s a 26% decrease in development of Alzheimer’s disease with a 50% increase in testosterone. Meaning that if you increase your testosterone by 50%, the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease goes down almost 26%, which is an amazing study.
And now we want to talk a little bit about something that you might have heard about, and some of your doctors might even talk about prostate cancer and testosterone. Often the dogma that was produced in medical school, in fact, was that testosterone causes prostate cancer. So if you take testosterone, you are putting yourself at a higher risk of prostate cancer. A Harvard urologist looked into this study and what he did was he found men who actually had latent prostate cancer, prostate cancer that it wasn’t gonna treat, but just enough to be aware of it. And he told the people that he was concerned because of the fact that testosterone causes prostate cancer or so to speak. So he started giving these men testosterone and doing biopsies every few months. And what he found is that the cancer cells actually remitted, went down, and none of them developed prostate cancer. So he decided to go into the research and try to sort out where the research shows the link between prostate cancer and testosterone.
So the number of studies that were produced that he found that link prostate cancer and testosterone equaled zero. There was not a single study that linked prostate cancer, an elevated testosterone. The reason why this whole dogma came about was in the 1940s, a man who was castrated received testosterone, a single patient. And at that time, there weren’t advanced testings. He had developed, prostate cancer, which metastasized. Now we don’t know if he had that prior, but the entire dogma of prostate cancer and testosterone is based on a single patient in 1940. No other studies have ever linked the two. And in fact, when you think about it, who develops prostate cancer? Older people with low testosterone.
And so Dr. Morgentaler, who’s a Harvard urologist, decided to look at patients who were having prostate cancer. And what he found is that the men who norm, who are having prostate cancer actually have lower testosterone. His research is not done, but all the … all the research points, at this point, that prostate cancer is not caused by testosterone, but in fact protective. So basically, this slide shows that there was no increased risk of cancer with testosterone. And there was one study that showed that … that only, that one study showed that the patient who had low testosterone had an increased risk of cancer, was by that single patient.
So what the conclusions are, as you could see, that there is now a greater link to an increase in estrogen in men to prostate cancer, than testosterone, which makes total sense. What we talked about is when men decrease their testosterone, they increase their estrogen, which is actually the link to prostate cancer. Next slide, we’re gonna talk about heart health and cardiovascular health.
There were two studies … recent studies that were done. And in 2011, there was a study done that was published in the Journal of Cardiology. And they found that men who had received testosterone replacement had a decreased risk of cardiac death. A Rotterdam study showed that there was the highest percentage of heart plaques occur in men with low testosterone. And the third study showed that testosterone gel actually reduced angina in men. So there has been now multiple … more studies that are proving that low testosterone is greatly related to heart disease and cardiac.
This is just a fun slide, and what a lot of people talk about is the negative connotations in a lot of the sports media about testosterone, steroids, things like that. Now, testosterone is a steroid, but the steroids you hear about on the news media about the baseball players taking is much different. They’re designer steroids. They’re at four … They’re at 20 times the potency of what we would give as a normal testosterone dose. So … when you hear about the steroids that baseball players and football players take, this is not what we’re discussing. We’re discussing natural testosterone replacement, something your body is missing that we’re replacing.