Have you wondered what age group has the highest testosterone level? What about the lowest? In this video, we're going to dig ...

is-your-testosterone-optimized-for-your-age-what-you-need-to-know

Is Your Testosterone Optimized for Your Age? What you need to know

have you ever wondered what the normal testosterone level is for your age I'm Dr Reena Malik urologist and pelvic surgeon and today we're going to review some new research digging into what testosterone levels are on average for men between the ages of 20 and 44 so according to the American Urological Association low testosterone levels are less than 300 nanog per deciliter and in order to officially diagnose low testosterone you have to have two serum total test testosterone levels in the early morning and we say early morning because among men with traditional sleep patterns mean you usually sleep between 10: p.m. and 6:00 a.m. your Peak testosterone values occur between 3: and 8:00 a.m. and those levels tend to decrease quite significantly throughout the day particularly they've looked at total testosterone levels at 400 p.m. in men who are 30 to 40 years old and they found that they're 20 to 25% lower than measurements taken at 8:00 a.m. and why do you take two well that's because there's really significant variability between testosterone levels even if they're from you and this has actually been shown in research that repeat testosterone levels can vary between 65 to 153% between tests and when you use two measurements this is actually reduced to somewhere between 30 and 43% the problem with this 300 NR per deciliter value is that it was dery from testosterone Replacements trials that were done in men above the age of 45 also we we know that testosterone levels decline with age and lastly cffs vary depending on the society you're looking at so while the American neurological Association says 300 there are societies that go as low as 200 and societies that say cut offs are as high as 350 nog per deciliter so I know in my practice there's tons of young men who come in talking to me about having symptoms of low testosterone and what are those symptoms well they can be fatigue low sex drive difficulty with erections having reduced muscle mass maybe losing some armpit or pubic hair or noticing that the testicles are smaller than usual or even having hot flashes some guys will also have depression or difficulty with concentration and memory or even notice that their breast tissue is enlarging so these are serious symptoms right and really bothersome to a lot of people so in these young guys I'll often check their testosterone and get a level somewhere between 300 and 400 nog per deciliter now while that's considered normal over overall it might not actually be normal for them and we've never really had great data to discuss what exactly is expected to be normal for them and now we do so in this study a group of researchers pulled data from the national health and nutrition examination survey and this is a survey that looks at a sample of people from around the United States that's supposed to be representative of the national demographics meaning that they are the same kind of age breakdown the same racial breakdown and many other factors so they looked at this survey from from 2011 to 2016 and in this survey they can gain all sorts of information including interviews physical examination values and laboratory tests so they specifically picked men between the ages of 20 to 44 who underwent an early morning testosterone level somewhere between the times of 6:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. and then they broke down these men into 5year age groups meaning 20 to 24 25 to 29 and so on and so forth up to 40 to 44 and pulling all the data they got to about 1,500 men whose average age was about 32 years old so what did they find well they found that in the 25 to 29 year age group that the mean testosterone was the highest the average testosterone that was 514 nog per deer and when you look at those who were 40 to 44 group was the lowest of 430 nog per deiler they also found that for every single year you age they saw a decrease in testosterone of 4.3 nanog per deciliter and then they decided Well how do we do age specific cut off for low testosterone well when they looked at the American neurological Association guidelines they looked at tertiles meaning if you broke up the men in a certain age group the first third of them would have testosterones at this level the next third would have them in this level and the last third would have them in this level and it was kind of like a bell curve with the majority of the people being in the middle tertile and so they looked at their data in the same way to decide what would be a age specific cuto so they found that the age specific cut off starting from 20 to 24 year- olds all the way to 40 to 44 year olds was 409 413 359 352 and 350 so this is a great starting point for a discussion about what is considered normal in your age group and where is kind of the beginning of normal considered however this is not a perfect study and there are some limitations one is that we don't know if the men in the study actually had low testosterone because they didn't actually look if they had symptoms of low testosterone so you would imagine that if you're getting a representative sample of the United States there will be several men who have low testosterone in fact that may mean that the cut off is actually a little bit higher if you look at only men who don't have low testosterone symptoms secondly the N Hayes database only got one serum testosterone level and we know that if you have an abnormal testosterone level 30 to 34% of those men will have a normal testosterone level over the next 24 hours so you're kind of overdiagnosing maybe a third of people with low testosterone so in Ideal World you get both those numbers and maybe average those or look at the highest number to get a true normal value so while this is interesting and useful if you are having low testosterone symptoms please make an appointment with your doctor your urologist your endocrinologist to discuss what this means and if you are candidate for treatment for low testosterone and that doesn't always mean getting testosterone it may mean doing a host of other things so I've talked about low testosterone many times in the past including what to do to boost your testosterone levels what testosterone replacement therapy is and how it works symptoms lots of stuff so check out my testosterone playlist to learn more if you've enjoyed this video please make sure to subscribe it means the world to me I totally appreciate it and if you want a reminder to take care of yourself check out my take care of yourself water bottle and coffee mug where you can remind yourself to take care of yourself because you're worth it [Music]

Dr.

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