SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

Want to learn more about fiber types? ➫ review past SuppVersity articles I am not telling you a secret, when I say that testosterone alone - in the absence of training - will lead to significant increases in skeletal muscle mass (if you think that sounds like a secret you must have missed my previous article from the "Intermittent Thoughts on Building Muscle" series | read more ). To a certain extend, the same is true for DHT ( learn more ), and - as a recent 6-week rodent study by Karina Fontana, Gerson E. R. Campos, Robert S. Staron and Maria Alice da Cruz-Höfling shows even by the structurally similar, orally bioavailable derivative Mesterolone (aka Proviron ), which produces pretty drastic, fiber-type specific increases in muscle size, when it is administered in super-physiological doses for 6 weeks (Fontana. 2013). AAS +/- HIT = ? Basically the question the researchers from the universities of Campinas (Brazil) and Ohio had in mind, when they came up with the...

Poor guy! Must have taken too much creatine and treated his hair for muscle ;-) Ok, seriously, creatine may have helped a little that he was able to build this impressive physique, but the hair? Come on, seriously!? If you have been around the bulletin boards of the fitness and bodybuilding community, I am pretty sure you will have heard about creatine induced increases in dehydrotestosterone (DHT). Probably you will also have had someone chime in who claimed that his hair started to fall out, when he started to use creatine supplements - right? Well, I guess in that case you will probably also remember how another guy chimed in and said: "Hold on does that mean that creatine will cause prostate cancer?" Never heard something like that? I suggest you trust my word, then; and in case you want "scientific evidence" head over to www.pubmed.com and type in "creatine D" it will offer you "creatine DHT" as one of the typical search phrases people...

Regular visitors of the SuppVersity will know that the stigmatization of DHT goes without reasonable and conclusive scientific research. In their editorial to the Annals of Internal Medicine Swerloff & Wang ( Swerloff. 2010 ) conclude from the results of more recent studies into the various effects of DHT on different tissues: In normal men, serum DHT levels are approximately 10% of the serum testosterone levels, whereas intraprostatic DHT levels are much higher than serum levels, with the intraprostatic DHT–testosterone ratio being 7 to 8 (12). Although the authors did not measure DHT levels in the prostate after DHT administration , Page and coworkers (13) recently reported that prostatic DHT levels did not increase when pharmacologic doses of DHT were administered (Page S. Personal communication.). These findings are consistent with those of Marks and colleagues (12), which demonstrated that administration of testosterone to mildly testosterone-deficient men increased serum t...

Fellow men, common (bro-)science tells us that dihydrotestosterone (DHT, molecular structure see image on the right. HMDB ) will make your hair fall out and trigger cancerous growth of your prostate. Current research, however, suggests that Estrogen might just as well be the real culprit when it comes to unwanted growth a few inches above your testes. This is, as Williams (2010) phrases it, part of a "controversial break-through" achieved by scientists in the course of the last months and the results of which he sums up as follows: "The synergistic action of unopposed oestrogen and leptin , compounded by increasing insulin, cortisol and xeno-oestrogen exposure directly initiate , promote and exacerbate obesity, type 2 diabetes, uterine overgrowth, prostatic enlargement, prostate cancer and breast cancer ." It was thus certainly no bodily injury caused by negligence, when Konnelius et.al. 2002 administered 125-250mg transdermal DHT to 60 subjects (age range, 50...