Response to Media Reports
Associating Testosterone Treatment
With Greater Heart Attack Risk
Headline news stories on November 5, 2013, parroted a study proclaiming that aging men using testosterone drugs suffer greater heart attack risk.
Life Extension® immediately recognized errors in this anti-testosterone study that render its findings meaningless.
This study was designed by physicians who apparently don’t know how to safely restore testosterone levels in aging men.
The media’s portrayal of this flawed study will discourage aging men from properly restoring their testosterone levels. To help spare the lives of testosterone deficient men, we have prepared an extensive rebuttal to this erroneous report.
For those who choose not to read our extensive rebuttal, I’ve prepared the following brief summary:
1) In order to protect against heart disease, total testosterone blood levels need to be raised higher than 500–550 ng/dL. Life Extension believes that optimal youthful total testosterone is in the 700–900 ng/dL range.
The men enrolled in this flawed study only boosted their mean total testosterone levels to 332 ng/dL. Previous studies show this low testosterone level (332 ng/dL) is associated with an increased heart attack risk compared with levels above 500–550 ng/dL.
2) The men in this study were not properly individually dosed and monitored, which explains why the testosterone treatment they received failed to restore their blood testosterone levels to anywhere near cardio-protective ranges.
3) Estradiol (an estrogen) blood levels were not reported in this study used to discredit testosterone drugs. A subset of aging men, often with increased visceral body fat (body fat around the internal organs of the abdominal cavity), have a tendency to convert testosterone into excess estrogen. This excess estrogen may alter the balance of anticoagulant and procoagulant (clotting) factors in the blood, and potentially enhance the risk of heart attack and stroke. Any man treated with testosterone drugs should also have his estradiol blood level tested to ensure that the testosterone is not excessively converting to estrogen. If estradiol increases excessively, then low-dose aromatase-inhibiting drugs (such as 1 mg/week of anastrozole
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