Testosterone Therapy: Review of Clinical Applications
When Should Men Consider Testosterone Replacement Therapy?
Since everyone metabolizes medications differently, your Hone care team stays with you every step of the way—ready to answer questions and fine-tune your plan so you feel your absolute best. Your licensed physician will review your labs & health history to diagnose your symptoms and create a personalized plan. If you are experiencing any of these symptoms and want an evaluation, give either our Lafayette or Hope Mills men’s health and wellness clinic a call today. The fact is, primary care providers are “in the trenches” and extremely busy handling many complicated medical issues every day. Adding a “Low-T” conversation to a 15-minute office visit about Diabetes, Hypertension, and Cholesterol can be overwhelming. Low-T deserves a visit all by itself, so we decided to provide that to Fayetteville and surrounding communities.
This condition, benign prostatic hypertrophy, can be made worse by testosterone therapy. Testosterone replacement therapy (TRT) is a shot, patch, or gel of the hormone testosterone to bring the level back to normal. testosterone replacement therapy dr phillips is produced in your testes (testicles), the sex organs in men, and is responsible for masculine traits. Patients often want to know how frequently they will need to meet with a provider while taking testosterone. Although the frequency of visits can depend on treatment selected, a good rule of thumb is to expect to follow-up with your team every three months during the first year.
For older men, it’s important to determine if a low testosterone level is due to normal aging or if it is due to a disease called hypogonadism. Patients on short-acting IM or short-acting SQ pellets (testosterone cypionate or enanthate) should have their testosterone measured after several cycles such that testosterone level equilibration has been achieved. The Panel recommends that this be completed no earlier than three to four cycles. While no data exist on the optimal timing of the blood draw within a cycle, it has historically been recommended that blood draws be conducted mid-cycle. The main driving force behind such a strategy is convenience for patients and clinicians, although such timing has no ability to define peak and trough levels. In addition to issues relating to the reliability of compounded products themselves, appropriate clinical studies on pharmacokinetics are lacking.
It may be difficult for men to detect this themselves, but their sleeping partner can often tell. A sleep study (polysomnography) may be needed to make the diagnosis. Whether these effects are barely noticeable or a major boost depends on the person. A nurse or technician may give you testosterone as a shot directly into a muscle. You’ll be shown which body parts you can use for the injection site, as they need to be rotated.
Although guidelines are intended to encourage best practices and potentially encompass available technologies with sufficient data as of close of the literature review, they are necessarily time-limited. Guidelines cannot include evaluation of all data on emerging technologies or management, including those that are FDA-approved, which may immediately come to represent accepted clinical practices. For this reason, the AUA does not regard technologies or management which are too new to be addressed by this guideline as necessarily experimental or investigational. Given the increasing incidence of both testosterone deficiency and prostate cancer with advancing age, it is common for the two conditions to co-exist in older men. Product labels for all testosterone formulations explicitly state that their use is contraindicated in men with a history of prostate cancer, which results from Huggins’ precept that testosterone therapy feeds prostate cancer cell proliferation. It was decided that a cut-off value was critical to define testosterone deficiency and that this cut-off be based on at least two total testosterone levels drawn in an early morning fashion at the same laboratory using the same assay.
These may be advantageous in men who prefer not to take testosterone directly or those in whom taking testosterone directly is not advised (e.g. , men attempting to preserve fertility). These medications may also be used in combination with the above testosterone formulations. Hone-affiliated medical practices are independently owned and operated by licensed physicians who provide services using the Hone telehealth platform. For more information about the relationship between Hone and the medical practices, click here.
Find out what they are and also what you should avoid if you want to increase your low-T. If possible, it’s best to make decisions about fertility before starting treatment. The risk of permanent infertility increases with long-term use of hormones.
Ultimately, it can significantly impact your quality of life, both physically and emotionally. The investment in TRT can be worthwhile in preventing the long-term costs of health struggles and a drop in life satisfaction. Getting older can be challenging, especially when you lose energy, libido, and strength.