Kidney Disease and Testosterone | How Kidney Disease Can Affect Testosterone & What You Can Do
This video is about kidney disease and testosterone. You don’t hear a lot about this talked about with kidney disease. Testosterone is a steroid hormone primarily found in males. You do have testosterone in women but the amounts are much less. What i’ll be talking about applies more to men than it does to women but it still has some small implications in women.
Testosterone is a hormone that’s responsible for production of your sexual organs. It’s also used for growth and development. If you don’t have enough testosterone when you hit puberty in the growth years, then you won’t grow as you should. It’s also responsible for muscle mass; it’s responsible for memory, so many things that testosterone is for. When you have a kidney disease and you have it for a while there’s a chance that in men you can get low testosterone levels. That’s something that happens and it’s something that’s pretty common.
I’m just gonna quote a little piece of research here from the Seminars In Nephrology that’s March 2021: Testosterone Disorders and Male Hypogonadism and Kidney Disease. That’s males that aren’t producing enough testosterone that’s what hypogonadism is. What they talk about here is that when people have kidney disease they can develop low testosterone levels which could be responsible or contributing to frailty anemia, decreased bone mineralization, depression, cognitive impairment, muscle wasting, that’s a big one. This is something that’s not ever checked. You don’t ever go to a nephrologist and they check your testosterone levels.
To get these checked you should go to an endocrinologist. Now when you decide to check this, this is something that you would focus on early on and right away. You would focus on all the other things we talked about in our videos which is getting a good nephrologist, taking some supplements that could help yourself, getting on a diet for kidney disease, and once you’ve addressed all these different areas with your nephrologist everything that they’re going to go through you’ve addressed all your lifestyle diet you can take a look at your testosterone levels because we don’t know 100 percent how much benefit there is to replacing testosterone.
We know there is a definite benefit but we’re still learning a lot about it so in order to get tested you generally got to go to an endocrinologist. You might be able to get a primary doctor to do it and if you are low then doing some type of testosterone replacement therapy can be beneficial for some of those things we talked about. As I said, don’t jump to that first. You got to take care of all the other basic stuff first. You got to take care of all the uremia, the buildup of kidney toxins, because they find that low testosterone sometimes is secondary meaning that when you have uremic low testosterone you have too much toxins in your body. You can’t produce testosterone properly.
That’s why I say take care of all the other stuff and then afterwards if you want to look at it further you can get your testosterone level tested. Let’s say you test low and you’re thinking about supplementing. You have an option of using prescriptions which is testosterone replacement therapy, or you can use something over the counter that will help produce testosterone. We have a few things over the counter. We have some natural hormones that you could find at health food stores, and one of them is called DHEA. It goes by a few names. They call it the master hormone sometimes. It’s referenced as because it creates other hormones in your body. You can take a supplement of DHEA. You would start low, 20-25 milligrams preferably a micronized DHEA. That’s micronized DHEA, 20- 25 milligrams and that can help a lot of the issues that i’ve mentioned earlier.
You can also test for DHEA. Ideally you wouldn’t just test for testosterone, you would do a male panel; that’s a male panel of hormones where it would include testosterone and the DHEA because you can see where your levels are at. So you have those two options when it comes to this. There’s a couple other out there but these are the main two that people will use.
So you have the testosterone replacement therapy from your doctor and then you can get an over-the-counter natural replacement to see how that helps and again no matter what you do, get before and after blood work. This is more important for men. This really hasn’t shown a big significance in women because they just don’t have all that testosterone. They don’t need it, they don’t produce it, their bodies don’t don’t need it.
So with men this is something to take a look at. It also affects a lot of the sexual side effects you see with kidney disease in men like lack of libido, inability to have erections, so it can help a lot of those if you’re looking to improve that.
