The T stands for Testosterone!

Frustration with a TV commercial led me to spend much of Saturday afternoon learning about testosterone deficiency and treatment.

First the frustration and then the scientific input.

You may have noticed a commercial that talks about feeling lethargic and not yourself etc, with the voice over, "it may be LowT". It is a very cutesy, can it be cutesy and target men?, ad that is just another example of direct to consumer advertising for a medication. This is one of my top five pet peeves. I feel the same way about direct marketing anti-depressant medications, any medications really.

The pharmaceutical companies have a product to sell and they cannot sell it if people don't have the condition it is intended to treat. Well it can be used to treat other conditions, but that is another story. They are in it to make back the money they spent on development and then to turn a profit.

Now the drug company feels that it has to educate the public on the medical condition. Well, low testosterone is usually a matter of aging. It is also true that men who are overweight, sedentary, diabetic and who use tobacco are often in the group with low testosterone levels. It has not been said that lifestyle causes low testosterone levels, only that the condition is found to a higher degree in those situations.

BTW, the actual term for low testosterone is NOT low T, but hypogonadism. That has a nice singsong ring to it doesn't it?

Ok. The condition is real. I would hope that a well educated physician would know to evaluate a person for this if they had the symptoms. The condition does respond to treatment, of which there are several types. Mainly, injections, patches or gels. The oral treatment is not used in the this country due to risk of liver damage.

The Low T commercial directs you to a website to learn about the condition, I direct you instead to the Cleveland Clinic website...

http://my.clevelandclinic.org/services/testosterone_replacement_therapy/hic_testosterone_replacement_therapy.aspx

The website the ad directs you to is copyrighted by Solvay Pharmaceuticals, Inc. This company sells a gel to treat low testosterone and it encourages you to ask your doctor about it. I was able to learn a little about the options and risks of all TRT (testosterone replacement therapy) by reading this article:

Medical Progress: Risks of Testosterone-Replacement Therapy and Recommendations for Monitoring. Rhoden, Ernani Luis; Morgentaler, Abraham.
Volume 350(5), 29 January 2004, pp 482-492

And in a Medscape article I was able to find a chart that compared blood levels of testosterone by treatment. I learned that the TRT patch and gels are similar and that the injections were able to get the level up higher but for shorter periods. The gel is the most expensive of the medications at about 300 dollars a prescription.

An additional concern with the gel, which is not applied to the penis, but the arms, shoulders or stomach, is that it will get on someone else.

Hormone therapy is not to be taken lightly. There is not a consensus on treating hypogonadism with hormone therapy as it was years after we treated women with estrogen therapy it became apparent that it caused cancer.

My message to you today is to let the medical experts educate and treat, not the pharmaceutical companies.