Destroying the Myth About Testosterone Replacement and Prostate Cancer | Forum

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xysoom Sep 14 '19
I was still giddy when I decided to look up the article detailing the experience of testosterone administration to men with metastatic disease from the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Institute, published in 1981 by the urologic giant of his day, Willet Whitmore, and his colleague, Jackson Fowler. The short summary of the paper was quite damning. Over a course of eighteen years, fifty-two men with metastatic disease had undergone treatment with daily T injections, usually as a last-gasp treatment for their cancer. Of these fifty-two men, forty-five had experienced an “unfavorable response,” most within the first month of treatment.Test E (Test P) powder supplier

This seemed pretty grim. Maybe Huggins had been right after all, despite basing his conclusions on a solitary patient. But then I discovered something equally shocking in the fine print of this article. Of the fifty-two men studied, all but four had already been treated with castration or estrogen treatment to lower testosterone. And of these four previously untreated men, one had an early, unspecified unfavorable response, while the remaining three men continued to receive daily T injections for 52, 55, and 310 days without apparent negative effects. In fact, one of these men was reported to have had a “favorable response” to T administration.

Drs. Fowler and Whitmore were impressed by the difference in outcomes for the untreated group of four men compared with the men who had already undergone hormonal treatment to lower testosterone. To explain the lack of negative effects on the untreated men, the authors postulated the following: “Normal endogenous testosterone levels may be sufficient to cause near maximal stimulation of prostatic tumors.” In other words, raising testosterone levels beyond the normal range did not seem to cause any increased cancer growth, even in men with metastatic disease!

This important concept was lost in the headline of the study, which clearly indicated that giving testosterone to men with prostate cancer was associated with rapid onset of negative consequences in most men. One had to read the article closely to learn that the headline applied only to men who had been previously castrated. Although this article has been cited for many years as evidence that T administration causes rapid and near-universal growth of prostate cancer (PCa), the authors in fact clearly made the point that the worrisome effects of T administration did not appear to occur in their small group of men without prior hormonal treatment.
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