Low testosterone doesn’t just affect energy, mood, and libido – it may also have a significant impact on your cholesterol levels. Regular monitoring is essential to ensure that any changes in hormone levels are matched with appropriate cardiovascular risk management. By increasing lean muscle mass and reducing fat mass, testosterone therapy may help improve insulin sensitivity and decrease visceral fat – two factors strongly tied to poor lipid profiles. TRT has also shown improvements in metabolic health that indirectly benefit cholesterol levels for some men. Your body uses cholesterol to create pregnenolone, a hormone that kickstarts the process of making testosterone and other steroid hormones. A 2013 study of older men, many with existing health problems, reported a higher rate of heart attacks in those taking testosterone compared to those who were not. Heart disease is one of the biggest concerns people have when they think about starting testosterone therapy (often called TRT). The type of testosterone therapy does matter when it comes to cholesterol. However, for patients with already low HDL or high risk of heart disease, a doctor may prefer gels, patches, or pellets instead of injections. Each method affects the body in a slightly different way, and research shows that these differences can also affect cholesterol levels. Right after an injection, levels are high, and just before the next dose, they are low. The two main injectable forms are testosterone enanthate and testosterone cypionate. The hormone is injected into a muscle, usually every one to four weeks, depending on the type. Understanding these differences can help patients and doctors make the safest choices. These findings again support the possibility that lower T concentrations may be a reflection rather than a cause of ill health. However, the authors did not observe an association between T concentrations and HDL-c or LDL-c levels. Overall, these types of retrospective analyses do not substantiate conclusions assigning a causal role for TRT in the development of cardiovascular morbidity but they clearly underscore the need for larger, randomized trials of TRT and CVD. However, data on prescription fulfillment were lacking, and whether the men prescribed TRT truly were hypogonadal, by both symptoms and T concentrations prior to receiving the prescription for T, was not determined. Furthermore, the actual exposure to T among the subjects is not clear, as the treatment group was categorized on the basis of a single-filled prescription, and post-treatment T levels were not measured nor was long-term use confirmed. All patients included in this retrospective analysis had low serum T concentrations and had undergone coronary angiography. Numerical data, displayed in Table 2, comparing cases and controls were analyzed by two-sample t-tests for independent samples assuming unequal variance. Categorical baseline data displayed in Table 1 were analyzed by χ2 -test. The serum levels of TT were measured using a commercial EIA kit (Pathozyme Testosterone; Omega Diagnostics Ltd, Omega House, Hillfoots Business Village, Alva FK12 5DQ, Scotland, UK.; Star Fax 1000), according to the manufacturer's instructions and with the lowest detection limit of 0.06 ng/ml and a coefficient of variation ≤10%. Separated sera were aliquoted and stored in a freezer at -70°C until analysis for testosterone. The case group (age ranged from 30 to 70 years) included 103 consecutive male patients with angiographically diagnosed CAD, awaiting coronary artery bypass graft.
