Genders. Power, creativity, drive, and insanity: the sex hormone testosterone models male attributes, but a feministly deluded society wants a man who is no longer a man. The resistance is growing.
The rapper Nazar is an idol at the age of 25. Wherever he goes he is surrounded by teenagers. He impressed the boy because he was often involved in fights and was therefore imprisoned. The girls get shiny eyes and adore him. “At the beginning, of course, I took advantage of my popularity, at times I needed a new cell phone number every few weeks because a few women terrorized me like this,” he says. “I made everything that wanted to be made happy,” he says in an emphatic Machomanian way. ?? But now I don’t care anymore, I live in a happy relationship, that gives me more ??.
The Iranian-born Nazar, who lives in Vienna, has an unusual masculine charisma; his effect on girls and young women is omnipresent. He doesn’t have to lie to anyone when he talks about his sexual escapades. Maybe he’s still understating. He is a masculine guy with a wiry, muscular body, and he has movement in the blood. It has rhythm, it makes the environment vibrate. And it shows aggression when it matters. He is a stage and spotlight person, and he has that slightly wicked touch that further enhances his attractiveness for women.
What makes a man so attractive, what makes him a man? Sure, the genes. But there is also something else that particularly determines to be a man? From brain structure to body shape, muscles and bones to behavior: the male sex hormone testosterone formed in the adrenal glands and testicles, which hormone researchers and andrologists have rediscovered since it was no longer demonized as cancer-promoting when it was used years ago administered to aging men to revitalize them. “We are fighting for this paradigm shift to gain breadth,” says Paul Schramek, head of the urology and andrology department at the Barmherzige Brüder hospital in Vienna.
At the end of January, the renowned science journal “Nature” cited a study that even suggested that dihydrotestosterone, a derivative of testosterone, could help men survive cardiovascular disease more easily. Australian researchers had treated endothelial cells, which are cells that line the human blood vessels, with dihydrotestosterone, whereupon the cells formed vascular-like structures. a well-known indicator of tissue repair. And several other studies show that medicine has to revise the picture it had of testosterone up to now in several points.
Hormones in the womb. Research has found a lot about the dominant male sex hormone, but far from everything. She knows the hormone activity in the womb, but she still doesn’t know exactly what triggers the hormonal explosion at the beginning of puberty. Neither does she know why some aging men feel wonderful with a low testosterone level and others with a relatively high hormone level complain of typical symptoms such as hot flashes, listlessness, depressed mood and lack of libido. And the connections between testosterone and the development of prostate cancer are much more complex than previously thought, as recent studies show.
In any case, testosterone is a hormone that controls the male body for a lifetime. According to a study carried out at the University of Göttingen in 2005, sex hormones in the womb determine whether the facial features of the fetus are more male or female. A typical indicator is the length ratio of index and ring fingers, according to the researchers: A longer ring finger speaks for a higher testosterone concentration and more masculine facial features.
The tiny thing in the womb initially receives the hormone from the mother, but as soon as its primary genital organs take on recognizable forms by the tenth week, it is already able to produce the substance that later makes it man. And in an increasing and so abundant amount that it is born as a real testosterone striezel. At birth, the baby boy has a hormone level like an adult male.
But where does the pregnant woman get the testosterone from to feed the growing baby in her belly? Contrary to the stereotype of exclusively testosterone-controlled men and exclusively estrogen-controlled women, androgens and estrogens, i.e. male and female sex hormones, are distributed across both genders. The woman even has ten times more androgens than estrogens. That you ?? except in the case of a hormone disorder ?? still no beard and no chest hair grow, is because it converts a lot of the testosterone into estrogen. In the end, a woman of childbearing age has just one-tenth the average testosterone amount of an adult man.
Male researchers want to emphasize this small difference again because it has become less and less important in a feminist society. They oppose gender equality and plead for boys to be boys again and men to be men again.
While still in the womb, the fetal brain is poled from testosterone to male. However, really good experimental data is only available from animal experiments. Via epigenetics, a kind of keyboard of the genes, structures, and circuits are formed in the central organ of thought and feeling that determine later behavior with clearly male domains: spatial imagination, creativity, madness, a tendency towards dominance and power, towards territorial struggles, Goofy, overestimating yourself and sometimes self-destructive aggression. But soon after birth, the boy’s hormonal system calms down, the testosterone level drops and then stays in the basement until puberty begins.
The connection of the brain, which is polarized to males, is still sufficient to often cause clear macho behavior in the toddler. “Boys can hardly crawl, they are already heading for the war toy, girls for their mother’s lipstick”, describes the Viennese gynecologist and hormone researcher Markus Metka, author or co-author of relevant books (“Der Mann 2000”, “Die Phyto -Hormone revolution ??) the phenomenon of early masculinity. Many parents, who refused to play war and violent toys for fear of being too masculine, must then be disappointed to see their four-year-old make a shooting iron out of Lego blocks. And as soon as the boy, who has just outgrown toddlers, finds a beating on the side of the road, he is already swinging it as a weapon.
Evolution. Behavioral researchers and psychologists make comparisons to our closest relatives: the male chimpanzee picks up a stone to throw, or they use sticks to attack each other. The females take a stone to crack a nut, a stick to poke for hidden food. Your actions are geared toward feeding offspring. The females move with their cubs in the middle of a wandering horde, and the alpha male, the pack leader, also has his place in the center. ?? Those who run around on the periphery and bear all the risks are the young males. They all make nonsense there and are scouts, ”explained emeritus Zurich psychiatry professor Jules Angst in an interview with the Hamburg news magazine“ Der Spiegel ”. We men have some of this risky behavior in our gene pool. We can’t just get out of our phylogenetic skin.
It is not without reason that the male emotion is often called “coming out of the balls”. described what often manifests itself in victorious athletes in the form of a protruding lower jaw, a clenched fist, and a primal scream. The demonstration of strength, sporting success has a not inconsiderable part to do with the masculine sex hormone ?? regular physical training increases the testosterone base concentration in the blood. The male sex hormone helps to lose fat and build muscle, which is why athletes also use artificial testosterone as a prohibited doping agent. And it hardens the bones ?? a characteristic that explains why men in old age suffer from osteoporosis much less frequently than women.
Conversion to estrogens. Every fat cell in the body is an enemy of the male sex hormone ?? because it helps convert androgens to estrogens. Aromatase, an enzyme contained in every fat cell, is responsible for this conversion. With so-called aromatase inhibitors, doctors try to prevent the conversion of androgens to estrogens and thus take the fuel away from the carcinoma. Weight loss and fat loss reduce aromatase activity.
Alcohol plays a similar role in the enzyme in the hormonal balance. It also promotes the conversion of androgens into estrogens, which is why oncologists advise their breast cancer patients to avoid alcohol as much as possible. “Obesity, diabetes, and arteriosclerosis reduce testosterone production,” explains Vienna-based urologist Anton Ponholzer, scientific director of an andrological working group in the Austrian Society for Andrology. The testosterone level, which often varies considerably from man to man, also determines the body composition and whether and in which body regions fat deposits are formed. A lot of testosterone means less body fat, but all the more muscle mass. Little testosterone tends to mean losing muscle mass and softening body shapes.
This difference is most clearly recognizable when the boy enters puberty when the previously less pronounced or occasionally soft body shapes quickly take on strong contours: the body becomes bony and muscular, the face loses its boyish features and becomes more angular, pubic. , Armpit and leg hair begin to grow massively. Guys, but also girls, start to sweat and smell different. The testosterone surge also activates the sebaceous glands in the skin, which then burst open, catch fire, form pimples or, in extreme cases, lead to acne with the typical acne scars. The level of testosterone in the blood fluctuates according to the time of day, and the curve reaches its absolute peak in the early morning hours. For some boys, the hormone attack is so explosive that those affected often do not even know what to do with their limitless sex drive. “I was so wild that I could have pierced a wall with my tail,” says a 60-year-old man describing his instinctual eruption in his youth.
What precisely triggers sexual maturity has only been known for a few years. A whole range of messenger substances, protein molecules and hormones are involved, but above all the peptide hormone kisspeptin, whose role in triggering puberty was only discovered in the late 1990s. The decisive factor is obviously the interaction of the peptide hormone with the KISS-1 gene as soon as the messenger substance leptin, which is produced in the adipose tissue, sends a corresponding signal. It may play a role in the fact that the youthful body exceeds a certain threshold of muscle and / or fat mass, as Werner-Klaus Waldhäusl, emeritus professor of the Vienna University Clinic for Internal Medicine III, suspects. And that puberty begins much earlier today than in the 19th century,
Prostate secretion. At the end of puberty, the young men peak their hormonal activity. The dihydrotestosterone formed from the testosterone not only increases libido, but it also promotes prostate secretion in order to provide a liquid packaging for the sperm formed in the testes, which enables ejaculation and the transport of the seminal threads. And it protects the male blood vessels so that the heart of the man can withstand the physical stress caused by multiple and persistent copulations without damage. Incidentally, testosterone also increases women’s libido, which is why gynecologists claim that androgynous women with more testosterone have a stronger sexual desire. With the fourth decade of life, the hormonal descent gradually begins, which is very slow and creeping in men but ends up abruptly in menopause in women around 45. The buzzword that came up about a decade ago about the “menopause” probably had to do with opening up new medical fields of business rather than with an actually widespread problem. According to literature, the testosterone level drops about 1.2 percent a year. However, Michael Rauchwald, head of the urology and andrology department at Vienna’s Donauspital, was amazed when he and his research group raised testosterone levels in addition to the prostate PSA level for men on the occasion of Lower Austria’s Health Day: ?? There was no significant decrease noticeable ??, reports the primary. The buzzword that came up about a decade ago about the “menopause” probably had to do with opening up new medical fields of business rather than with an actually widespread problem. According to literature, the testosterone level drops about 1.2 percent a year. However, Michael Rauchwald, head of the urology and andrology department at Vienna’s Donauspital, was amazed when he and his research group raised testosterone levels in addition to the prostate PSA level for men on the occasion of Lower Austria’s Health Day: ?? There was no significant decrease noticeable ??, reports the primary. The buzzword that came up about a decade ago about the “menopause” probably had to do with opening up new medical fields of business rather than with an actually widespread problem. According to literature, the testosterone level drops about 1.2 percent a year. However, Michael Rauchwald, head of the urology and andrology department at Vienna’s Donauspital, was amazed when he and his research group raised testosterone levels in addition to the prostate PSA level for men on the occasion of Lower Austria’s Health Day: ?? There was no significant decrease noticeable ??, reports the primary. According to literature, the testosterone level drops about 1.2 percent a year. However, Michael Rauchwald, head of the urology and andrology department at Vienna’s Donauspital, was amazed when he and his research group raised testosterone levels in addition to the prostate PSA level for men on the occasion of Lower Austria’s Health Day: ?? There was no significant decrease noticeable ??, reports the primary. According to literature, the testosterone level drops about 1.2 percent a year. However, Michael Rauchwald, head of the urology and andrology department at Vienna’s Donauspital, was amazed when he and his research group raised testosterone levels in addition to the prostate PSA level for men on the occasion of Lower Austria’s Health Day: ?? There was no significant decrease noticeable ??, reports the primary.
After the great euphoria with which doctors began to treat the alleged menopause of men with hormone substitutes in Europe ten years ago, according to the US model, disillusionment soon returned. In the United States, it turned out that the hormone substitutes, which were prescribed in a completely uncritical and uncontrolled manner and which were used to treat menopausal women in particular, led to an increase in breast cancer cases. As a result, only a few doctors dared to prescribe hormone preparations. Indeed, breast cancer rates in the United States have declined over the past five years.
Hormone status. Not so in Austria. Possible explanation: Unlike her US colleagues, domestic gynecologists had not uncontrollably prescribed artificial hormones as a lifestyle drug for more youthfulness, but mostly only in the case of massive changes, severe estrogen deficiency and regular monitoring of hormone status. For this reason, the breast cancer rate in Germany did not increase to the same extent as in the USA and consequently did not decrease to the same extent. “The fog is clearing up,” says the Vienna hormone researcher Johannes Huber, who, due to the US experience, had to put up with a lot of scolding for the hormone replacement therapy he propagated.
The scientific debate about artificial hormone replacement did not remain without effects on andrology. Cautious male doctors, who from the outset were not declared friends of hormonal tuition for the aging man, saw themselves confirmed. Others shifted down a gear and became more careful: it cannot be ruled out that hormone doses can also trigger cancer in men? in the case of the trigger or carrier of hormone-induced prostate cancer.
But meanwhile, the view of things has changed. “The idea that a high testosterone level triggers prostate cancer is too simple,” explains Androloge Rauchwald. A number of studies have meanwhile shown that the male hormone level in patients with aggressive prostate cancer is significantly low. “These are things that make you think,” says urologist Christian Kratzik from the Vienna Medical University, who was able to show in a study that testosterone levels drop significantly up to four years before such aggressive carcinoma occurs. “The cancer cell apparently builds testosterone from other substances,” says Kratzik.
In two other studies carried out in the previous year, Kratzik encountered an additional phenomenon: Testosterone administration in the case of massively metastatic, overtreated prostate cancer lowers the PSA value ?? a marker that indicates the amount of prostate-specific antigen and thus the existence or growth of a tumor. The researchers do not know why. Based on the literature and his own study results, Kratzik concludes: If you don’t have prostate cancer, testosterone doses will certainly not cause cancer. But artificial hormones could wake up a sleeping carcinoma. So I advocate caution.
But the idea that testosterone doses get the aging man up and running like elderly women is still tempting: Hormone researcher Huber reports about 80- and 90-year-old women, who experienced a lot of symptoms such as muscle weakness, fatigue and improved with testosterone treatment Forgetfulness. There are already considerations of using testosterone for Alzheimer’s prevention. His colleague Markus Metka recommends plant hormones because of their better bioavailability. For the weakening man extracts from the sabal fruit as well as from the ginseng, yams and tribulus roots.
The weakening powers of the aging man were already an issue in the Old Testament. King David felt weak, he shivered, was not concentrated, he lacked decision-making power, according to the legend. The wise men of Israel discussed what to do. Instead of giving medicinal plants to their king, they decided to look for the prettiest girl in Israel and found her in Sunem’s 16-year-old Abisag, who barely clothed her over the king’s loins. After a while, the king felt warmth rise in his body, he regained momentum and determination: he ordered two of his three potential successors to be killed.
Site Title 