Women and Testosterone

Testosterone is a male hormone but we women make a small amount of this hormone. You know when you sneeze and leak a little urine? Well testosterone in tandem with estrogen can tighten that up. Your uro-genital tract is lined with testosterone receptors ….hence your libido and response can be tied to your testosterone level. Testosterone therapy has been shown to significantly improve sexual function and psychological well-being in women.

Testosterone is also an anabolic hormone essential for creating energy, maintaining memory, regulating immune function, and building and maintaining structural tissues such as skin, muscle and bone. Low testosterone can correlate with low bone mass.

50% of women will run a normal testosterone level. Women who have had their ovaries removed tend towards lower levels of testosterone. These are women who can’t build muscle at the gym even though working out. However, 23% of perimenopausal women will have high testosterone. Why? There are a couple of reasons. First, by 50 years old the pituitary is stimulating the ovaries to make more estrogen, but the ovaries are out of estrogen however the stoma responds by increasing the output of testosterone.

Another reason a woman may have a higher-than-normal testosterone level could be a syndrome called Poly Cystic Ovarian Disease. These ladies never ovulated correctly, which means there is no progesterone on board to balance estrogen at a cellular level. Instead, the PCOS gal will produce testosterone to balance estrogen. This can be an ongoing problem. Even if the woman has her ovaries removed or goes into menopause, she will still run high levels of testosterone. High levels of testosterone cause belly fat (you are storing fat as a man does) and cause can serious metabolic problems like insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome.

Testosterone dosing: low dose in 0.25mg high dose is 4.0mg. I have been taught that if you take 10 women with libido issues and your give them high doses of testosterone to jump start their libido but do nothing else it will only help 2 out of 10 women.

Treating a breast cancer patient with testosterone only? You must have estrogen on board for testosterone to work. Breast cancer patients have no estrogen on board, the doctor give them testosterone only and it can cause heart and cardiovascular problems.

Signs of too much testosterone:

1) acne 2) excessive hair on the face & arms 3) unstable blood sugar 4) thinning hair on the head 5) anxiety, anger, agitation 6) weight gain around the waist

How do we treat high testosterone levels?

1) in younger women adding cyclic progesterone can normalize testosterone levels

2) Saw Palmetto: 250mg BID blocks action but doesn’t decrease levels

3) Metformin 500mg at bedtime

4) Spironolactone 100mg BID

5) Birth Control Pills: Look for one with drospirenone

6) Myo Inositol: 4 grams per day especially helpful with infertility

Web site to visit to learn more? visit Dr. Lara Briden online