Doesn't the proportionality change depending on how much you're injecting? Wouldn't 200mg have a higher percentage of aromatization than 50mg?
The proportionality will hold pretty well at lower doses. At higher and less physiological doses you will start to see saturation effects—as in the Michaelis-Menten model, which means that the incremental increases in estradiol are lower than expected. Effectively the constant of proportionality becomes lower with higher serum testosterone. This is because the amount of aromatase is fairly constant, and as testosterone increases the aromatase is increasingly tied up, and thus is less efficient in converting additional testosterone to estradiol.
Then dividing our doses and injecting more frequently has no benefit as far as aromatization?
On the contrary. The peak levels of estradiol have importance that is independent of average levels. Thus if you inject 100 mg of TC once a week then your estradiol goes considerably higher than if you take 50 mg twice a week, even though total estradiol produced each week is a little lower with the single large dose. Anecdotally it appears that guys have more problems with larger swings in hormones over multiple days—compared to relatively stable levels. Thus dividing the doses and injecting more frequently is a common strategy for improving TRT.
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Tried to find this to repost. Great post!People don’t read my posts.
How to Predict Estradiol and DHT at Different Testosterone Doses
I was able to come up with a table using the predictive model equation derived from data in this study: The Effects of Injected Testosterone Dose and Age on the Conversion of Testosterone to Estradiol and Dihydrotestosterone in Young and Older Men Summary This video discusses a research paper...
This begs an important question for me. Would this mean that splitting your dosage into smaller daily or EOD T dosing results in obviously lower peak estradiol concentrations, yet a lowered ratio between testosterone and estradiol given the saturation effect at higher dosages?
Consider some extremes: daily injections versus weekly injections of testosterone cypionate with the same total weekly dose. Suppose that the daily injections yield fairly constant serum testosterone at about 600 ng/dL. Using the figures for young men in the paper I referenced above we find estradiol is 23 pg/mL and the aromatization rate is 0.39%. With these results, it would not be unusual for a single large weekly injection to yield a trough testosterone of around 350 ng/dL and a peak of around 850 ng/dL. The implication for estradiol is that saturation effects are more noticeable in the first part of the injection cycle, being most prominent at the peak and declining from there. At the peak, total estradiol is 30 pg/mL and the aromatization rate is indeed lower, at 0.36%. At the trough, estradiol is 15 pg/mL and the aromatization rate rises to 0.43%.
What you leave out is that the reference ranges give an indication of what's physiological. Guys on TRT are perfectly capable of maintaining such levels. Just because some guys overdose on testosterone doesn't mean they need new lab ranges. The existing ones serve to remind them of their excess, be it in testosterone, estradiol, or both.
Your estradiol may "need" to be higher to balance the excessive testosterone, but the long-term safety of high absolute levels is uncertain. Your phrasing on estradiol production makes it sound like serum levels are practically random. On the contrary, testosterone production is regulated by the hypothalamus and pituitary to produce the body's desired global level of (free) estradiol. With serum testosterone over 1,200 ng/dL your estradiol is nowhere near your natural set point.
