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06.06.2022

Women, testosterone and sex | And zinc

Oh yeah. What a headline! Put something like that above your article, and you know it will be read. It's just a shame that 'zinc' had to be added as well. This makes it a nutritionally nerdy article, which the seven readers of this web magazine may appreciate, but which has made reaching an audience of millions an impossibility.

Study
While Western biomedical researchers are increasingly turning their attention to genes, RNA, and molecular mechanisms (allowing a pharmaceutical company to launch an expensive drug on the market in a hundred years' time), biomedical researchers outside the West are busy with simple things like the effects of simple, safe and dirt cheap supplements.

That is why Western scientists look down on their colleagues in poorer countries. And that is also the reason why scientists in poor countries are increasingly publishing studies that can be directly useful for a large group of world residents, and make their lives a little better.

The trial that Leila Mazaheri Nia, affiliated with Jundishapur University of Medical Sciences in Iran, published in the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, is such a study. The Iranians experimented with 116 post-menopausal women, all of whom had low zinc levels.

Nutritionists find that a healthy zinc level fluctuates somewhere between 66 and 110 milligrams of zinc per liter. The women who participated in the Iranian study had a zinc level of less than 62 milligrams per liter of blood.

The women also reported sexual problems. The researchers determined this on the basis of the Female Sexual Function Index questionnaire (FSFI). The higher you score, the fewer problems. On average, women score 29 on this. In the Iranian study, the average score was about 19.

The Iranians divided their subjects into 2 groups. One group took a placebo daily for 6 weeks, while the other group took a daily capsule containing 25 milligrams of elemental zinc in the form of 110 milligrams of zinc sulfate.

Results
Zinc supplementation naturally increased the zinc level, but also the testosterone level. The effect on testosterone levels was impressive. It just about doubled.

The same was true for the women's scores on the FSFI. Zinc supplementation increased the average score from 19.23 to 31.91.

When the researchers tried using statistical techniques to find out whether an increase in testosterone levels could explain the improvement in sexuality, they stumbled upon something remarkable. It was beyond dispute that zinc supplementation increased the testosterone level. That zinc supplementation improved the FSFI was evident as well. But there was no clear link between testosterone and FSFI scores.

Conclusion
"Given [...] the fact that many postmenopausal women are not interested to use hormonal therapies to treat sexual dysfunction due to fear of side effects from these drugs, it seems that zinc supplement can be safely used to treat sexual dysfunction in postmenopausal women", write the researchers.

Source:
J Sex Marital Ther. 2021;47(8):804-13.

More:
Preventing zinc deficiency, preventing (or surviving) covid 15.07.2021
Less frequent migraines due to zinc supplements 12.11.2020
Zinc supplement accelerates weight loss during slimming diet 31.10.2020

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