do testosterone boosters actually work I'm Dr Vina Malik urologist and pelvic surgeon and in the next few weeks I'm going to be releasing several videos on testosterone boosters basically a variety of supplements and dietary adjuncts that people often promote for the benefit of improving testosterone having low testosterone is increasingly more common and I've talked about this before in a number of videos but we now know that almost 40% of men over the age of 40 have some symptoms of low testosterone this can include things like fatigue erectile dysfunction decreased sex drive decreased muscle mass mood changes or depression and even cognitive changes or brain fog having low testosterone puts you at a higher risk of a number of metabolic issues like diabetes high cholesterol cardiovascular disease However unfortunately a lot of times people either don't see a physician or don't get treated for their low testosterone and hence they're more often looking for other ways or natural ways to improve their testosterone so my goal with this series is to empower you with the knowledge to find things that actually work but do realize that dietary supplements have a huge financial incentive to get you to buy them just for scale in 2018 nearly $9 billion of supplements were sold in the United States 9 billion ultimately you have to do your own research and I'm going to help you with that so let's get get down to the data do these actually work today we're going to be talking about andrine diione andrine dial and dhaa now these supplements were available over the counter from the years of 1986 to 2004 at which point the FDA and the US Department of Health and Human Services relabeled andrine Dion and andrastin dial as anabolic steroids and started tightening regulations so that these were now scheduled three controlled substances and required a prescription from a physician DHEA Still Remains available over the counter let's start with ostin diione now all of these are pro hormones and they're involved in the cholesterol pathway and so ostin Dion is an endogenous Androgen it synthesized through the cholesterol pathway from pregnanolone and progesterone it's later then converted to testosterone by the action of a specific enzyme called 17 beta hydroxy steroid it's also converted to estrone which is later converted into estradi and just to give you a basic understanding testosterone estradi in your blood send signals back to the brain or the hypothalamic pituitary axis to tell you do you have enough or do you need more and so if you have more of it it's going to tell your body to decrease production of testosterone or estradi and vice versa in the studies of endros diione they supplemented men with 300 milligrams daily for once a month in that one month they did see a significant increase in total testosterone levels of about 34% however when they continued that supplementation for up to 12 weeks at 300 milligrams daily they actually noticed that the testosterone went back to Baseline and there was no longer an increase they did however notice that there was an increase in estradi levels and this is important because when estrogens or estral are elevated it can lead to some Adverse Events this can in include things like having breast enlargement what we call gynecomastia or having unfavorable lipid profiles meaning that your cholesterol your bad cholesterol goes up in addition to looking at blood levels they also looked at lean body mass and what they found was that there was no increase in lean body mass or type 2 muscle fibers and there was no decrease in fat Mass so these are all things that we would expect to see if you're increasing your testosterone you'd expect to see more lean body mass less fat mess they did see in blood work that there was an increase in LDL to HDL as well as an increase in apol lipo protein a to APO lipoprotein B meaning that you are now at higher risk for cardiovascular events because of these changes in your lipids so ultimately while this mechanistically seemed like oh this is great it's a pro hormone it's going to lead to more testosterone production it didn't end up making a lasting impact with daily supplementation and it didn't actually give you the anabolic changes or muscle growth that you would expect if you were taking testosterone now let's move on to ostin dial now this is another product of the cholesterol pathway it's actually converted from DHEA and then later down the line converted to directly to testosterone however the mechanism of action is believed to be that the ostine dial converts to ostine dial and the reason for this is when they did studies on ostin dial they found actually in increas levels of andrastin diome now after they supplemented ostin dial for about 28 days they again they saw the significant in increase in andrastin diione as well as free testosterone and dihydrotestosterone but there was no change in the serum testosterone or the total testosterone now this sounds great right free testosterone is the testosterone that's available for your body to use for all those good activities however in this study they also o noticed an increase in serum estradi or other estrogens and they saw the same negative impacts in terms of lipids so they saw decreased HDL increased LDL and subsequently they were worried about an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and also looking at lean body mass they did not see a benefit in terms of lean body mass or fat Mass with andrastin dial okay so let's move on lastly to DHEA now DHEA is also a precursor of test testosterone and it's actually been relatively reasonably well studied so looking at the initial studies of dhaa they supplemented them for over 12 weeks and they saw of course an increase in DHEA as expected meaning that you're taking it it's actually causing an increase in DHEA but they did not see a statistically significant increase in lean body mass strength or serum testosterone levels now looking at all the data together in what we call metaanalyses of the highest quality studies double blinded Placebo controlled randomized controlled trials they again found that there was a significant increase in DH as well as estradi levels after supplementation but there was no significant increase in total serum testosterone and they looked at some other things they also saw no improvement in bone mineral density or sexual function outcomes including erectile function the good news is they didn't see any changes in the lipid profiles like they did with the Andro supplements however because there's an increase in asial it is something that I would monitor if you decided that you wanted to try DHEA based on the data that I reviewed for Andro as well as DHEA I would say that probably these are not the best supplements to use and this is because you know pro hormones they have multiple conversions and Pathways they don't necessarily just go straight to testosterone and so because of these multiple conversions you can have these unintended or negative impacts like like the ones we talked about so ultimately I would generally recommend not using these supplements to boost your testosterone now again like I said I'm going to continue this series all through the summer talking about a variety of different supplements that are highly tied to boost testosterone so make sure you subscribe and hit the notification Bell so that every video that comes out you get notified and next week I'm going to review Fen Greek also known as tanella fonum graum if you want to check out my older videos on tonat Al and ashwagandha which are also ingredients that are often found in testosterone boosting supplements check those out I may remake those but at this point in time those are available for you to review as well and as always we're going to take care of yourself because you're worth it