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24.11.2016

How after just one testosterone injection your endogenous testosterone production plummets

The effect of using synthetic testosterone on the testosterone your own body produces is bigger than doctors think, according to Swedish endocrinologists at the Karolinska Institutet. The Swedes wrote about the study they did for WADA in Substance Abuse and Rehabilitation.

Study
The researchers gave 25 men aged between 27 and 43 single injections of 125, 250 or 500 mg testosterone-enanthate on three different occasions. In the weeks that followed the researchers analysed the blood of their subjects.

Results
Four days after the injections the concentration of the hormones LH and FSH had gone down considerably. Because FSH and LH stimulate the production of testosterone by the testes, it meant that the body's own production of testosterone declined strongly too. The figures below show the reduction in LH and FSH levels in percentages. The higher the bar, the greater the decrease.

Two weeks after the injection the body's own production of testosterone was still on the low side. After the 500 mg injection the production of LH and FSH had declined even further, to 92 and 94 percent respectively. That meant that the subjects were only producing 8 percent of the usual amount of LH and 6 percent of the usual amount of FSH.

By the way: six weeks after the injection of 500 mg testosterone-enanthate the subjects' own production of testosterone was still not fully restored.

The way in which the subjects' hormonal balances reacted to the injections varied, as the figure below shows. You're looking at the effect on the LH level of the single injection of 500 mg testosterone.

In some subjects the LH level declined almost immediately; in others this took longer to happen. And there was one subject whose hormonal recovery seemed to be very rapid.

Conclusion
"Our results indicate that testosterone has a more profound and sustained endocrine effect on the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal axis than was previously known", the Swedes concluded. "Scientific proof of AAS-induced adverse side effects, together with the epidemiological data showing that the nonmedical use of AASs is a global health problem, implies that public efforts should be centered on primary prevention."

These days pharmacological bodybuilders use gram doses of testosterone. People in bodybuilding circles think nothing of taking a gram a week for two months on the trot. If you are aware of this, after reading the Swedish study you might start to wonder whether too many steroids users are going to be paying too high a price for their activities.

Source:
Subst Abuse Rehabil. 2014 Dec 10;5:121-7.

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