4. The treatment of late-onset hypogonadism
4.1 Late-onset hypogonadism and hCG therapy
The effect of the treatment of 908 patients taking hCG was described in 2010 (Gomula & Rabijewski, 2010). Below, I present a further study of 1200 men (age range 20-89 years; mean, 54). The mean follow-up period of the patients was over 37 months. During the therapy with hCG (2 x 5000 i.u. per week), there was an average increase in serum concentrations of total testosterone from 18.4 nmol/L to 38.59 nmol/L. It was noted that during the hCG therapy, there was no increase in SHBG. On the contrary, the SHBG concentrations even showed a slight decrease. This meant that as the result of hCG treatment, free and bioavailable testosterone concentrations increased. The rise was proportional to that in total testosterone, as was reported (Fiers & Kaufman, 1999). There was an average increase in free testosterone concentrations from 0.0829 ng/mL (1.98%) to 0.201 ng/mL (2.29%) The bio-available testosterone concentration also increased: − on average from 1.94 ng/mL (46.4%) to 4.71 ng /mL (53.6%). At the same time, there was a steady increase in the average concentration of estradiol, from 138.6 pmol/L to 280.9 pmol/L. In parallel, the average PSA level decreased by 40% (from 3.09 ng/mL to 1.83 ng/mL) after 37 months of therapy. These results are shown in Table 9, below.