Recent content by Cataceous

It's plausible, but will depend on the circumstances and the individual. I should have mentioned that oral testosterone is right at the border of what might be considered short-acting. The formulations based on testosterone undecanoate appear to be suppressive of the HPTA, but I think it was...

Verified short-acting forms of TRT at this point include testosterone nasal gel and buccal troches. It appears that absorbing 1-1.5 mg of testosterone via short-acting delivery methods 2-3 times per day does not result in a complete shutdown of the HPTA. I consider this highly desirable, as...

That estradiol isn't overly low, and furthermore, it's likely that estradiol lags testosterone by some time, perhaps a day or two. So it's possible that a day later your estradiol is significantly higher even as testosterone is declining. The lack of energy and motivation sounds like what I...

As an aside, this dose should never be characterized as "normal". Few, if any, healthy men on the planet are likely to be producing this much testosterone naturally. Actual replacement doses are more in the range of 40-100 mg TC/wk, with even the higher end of that being suspect. I assume that...

Are you generating these posts with AI? In any case, it's a myth that low SHBG makes "levels swing too fast". Variation in levels is controlled almost entirely by the form of TRT. Inject testosterone undecanoate and your serum testosterone changes very slowly. Put testosterone nasal gel up your...

Prices continue to rise, but I think originally I was getting FGF-18 for as low as $300 / 100 µg when buying a milligram. This is for the 98% purity grade. You can probably still get 95% purity for somewhat less money, though not sure if that's advisable. In any case, the protocol is three 100...

It points to using an immunoassay-based FT test, aka "direct" method, which is hopelessly inaccurate even when scaled. Use the Vermeulen result.

No androgen deficiency. The lowish SHBG means free testosterone is respectable, around 12.4 ng/dL by the Vermeulen calculation. Elevated estradiol is potentially an issue, but you need to confirm that the result is accurate. If the test is immunoassay-based then it could reflect significant...

The cited "natural" T: DHT ratios seem too low. I always figured more like 10-to-1. Long-term effects of being far from this are unknown. Per Grok: In healthy young adult men (typically ages 18–40), serum total testosterone levels generally fall in the range of about 300–1,000 ng/dL (often...

Ok, that is a good FT test, and I consider 125 pg/mL to be high for a daily trough level. Three hours post-injection is a reasonable time to start looking for the peak. Best guess is that the peak occurs in the 2-6 hour range. The truth about using numbers is that they are important, but they...

Which free testosterone test is that, both methodology and normal range? If it's a so-called direct test it's nearly meaningless. With many FT tests 125 pg/mL is very robust, sometimes even excessive, for a daily trough value. Increasingly I think the daily peak value of free testosterone is the...

I have some fresh lab work along with various thoughts: The TS protocol is the same as above, nominally 1.5 mg three times a day, with the actual dose seeming to be 40-50% lower than that. In this case I targeted lab work at 45 minutes post-injection to catch a possible higher peak in serum...

I did do a course of subQ BPC-157 injections several years ago and didn't seem to experience any benefit. Apparently there was a small, uncontrolled study with intra-articular injections in humans. The results were favorable, suggesting more research should be done. In theory though, if an...

Another update: I have complicated the protocol with ancillaries to the point that causality may become blurred. Nonetheless, I think that FGF-18 is and will remain the main actor, and it has the most supporting research. After the previous series of three FGF-18 injections I...

This is a stretch, as there are several caveats: It's a fairly small study, N=36, all but possibly four were college-educated, none was on exogenous testosterone. The cross-sectional design of the study means that it does not prove causality. Higher natural testosterone could be a byproduct of...