Washington University study shows men who have low Testosterone levels are associated with severe Covid infections.
Welcome to the BioBalance Healthcast, I’m Dr. Kathy Maupin and my partner Dr. Rachel Sullivan, joins me today to discuss a new research finding from Washington University, in St. Louis Missouri.
“Low Testosterone Levels in Men Resulted in More Severe Covid Infections”, according to a research study from Barnes Jewish Hospital in the spring of 2021. The study did not say that low testosterone levels were the cause of severe Covid infections however many of the symptoms of men who have low T levels ARE associated with severe Covid infections: older men, sicker men, men who were obese and had AODM (diabetes). All of these medical conditions improve with testosterone replacement with T pellets, so it is unclear whether the individual risk factors are risks or whether low testosterone that can cause all of these problems and occur in older men are the true risk.
Their study revealed that more men than women were affected by Covid, and men with lower T (around 53 ng/dl) or low T, had most severe Covid infection. Men with more than 151 ng/dl of Total T had less severe Covid infections. They state that they didn’t find women’s hormones associated with severity of Covid, but they didn’t test free- testosterone, which is the only real test of the effect of T in women!
More men died of Covid in the US and in my state of Missouri as well. I’d like to submit another possible cause for this fact. Male humans are more fragile than female humans both in infancy and when they are old. Women are well known. To live longer than men and that is inherent in their DNA. It may be that having one Y chromosome and one X, or being male, makes men less metabolically and immunologically hardy then women who have a matched set of Xs.
For example: We see this in male infant verses female infants at birth. Ask any Neonatal nurse. About the “wimpy boys” verses the girls. They will always confirm that If your baby is born female at the same preterm weeks as a male baby born at the same time, it is much more likely that the female infant will survive better and with fewer disabilities than a male. It is a fact that all prenatal nurses and doctors know, and they manage preterm babies with this in mind. Male babies do not have appreciable levels of testosterone, but the genetics of having only one X chromosome instead of 2, like females have might make men less robust metabolically at the beginning and end of life.
But let’s look at the hormone Testosterone and what it does to prevent infection in both men and women. Testosterone is a hormone that stimulates the Thymus gland which makes the immune cells called T Killer and T helper cells that kill cancer cells, bacteria and viruses. When both women and men age, their testosterone drops and their thymus glands shrinks, producing fewer and less aggressive T killer and Helper cells, which results in a poor immune response in aging people of both sexes. This is one of the hormonal reasons that aging men and women have a high rate of cancer, deadly infections as they age.
In our practice, Dr. Sullivan and I replace Testosterone to people over 40 for women and generally 50 for men, when Testosterone naturally is deficient. When we replace T with pellets, the number and activity of T-white blood cells increase. This means that when we replace both sexes with Testosterone in our practice, we see fewer cancers, and fewer severe infections as our patients age. This may be the reason fewer men with normal/or at least higher T levels did not become as ill when they got Covid.
Testosterone is not a guarantee, but it ups your chance of being healthy while those around you of the same age are getting sicker. We thank Wash U Researchers for confirming our observations and beliefs about the value of normal T levels when it comes to avoiding infections.
This Health cast was written and presented by Dr. Kathy Maupin, M.D., Bio-identical Hormone Replacement Expert and Author.
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