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Testosterone, How Does This Affect A Woman's Sex Drive? - Dr. Friedman (VIDEO)

 
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More Videos from Dr. Theodore Friedman 18 videos in this series

Testosterone, How Does This Affect A Woman's Sex Drive? - Dr. Friedman (VIDEO)
Testosterone, How Does This Affect A Woman's Sex Drive? - Dr. Friedman (VIDEO)
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Dr. Friedman describes how testosterone affects a woman’s sexual desire.

Dr. Friedman:
I am doing a study giving testosterone to women with pituitary problems. The pituitary makes many hormones that are very involved in aspects of women’s health, including testosterone that regularly makes LH and FSH.

The LH regulates the testosterone from the ovaries and the pituitary makes ACTH, which regulates testosterone for adrenal glands.

A woman that has pituitary problem may have very low testosterone. Men that have low testosterone be give testosterone all the time. We know it helps them, but we are not really sure if giving testosterone to a woman is a good idea or not. We are not even sure how much important is this low testosterone in women.

So I have been doing some research on this. I have a grant on this, and we found that women with pituitary problem often and do have very low testosterone levels and associated with that they have depression, psychological problems, low libido.

We have them do surveys on their interest in sex; their ability to have orgasms; how they enjoy sex and the women with pituitary problems have very low scores on these tests.

They seem to have very low muscle strength, for example. They do poorly in some cognitive testing, and we are not sure completely but we think this is due to testosterone.

I recently analyzed our data with the questions about the libido in the women with low testosterone and very interesting, we looked at both patient with pituitary problems and normal patients together.

The patients with pituitary problems had very low testosterone levels. The patients were normal had levels like in here and the patients regardless of the group that had the higher testosterone problems they had less libido problems.

The patients with lower testosterone had more libido problems. And this is different from most of the literature that only looked at sort of normal patients within sort of this narrow range up here, we had a much bigger spread of testosterone levels. So we were able to find a very significant correlation with low testosterone levels and low libido.

However, what was interesting, we also had the patients do tests that we thought would be objective measures of how testosterone worked. So we measured blood flow to the genital organs with an ultrasound.

We thought if the testosterone was low they might have low blood flow to their genital organs. Sure enough they didn’t. They just had low libido, low testosterone levels but the blood flow to their genital organs was completely normal.

Similarly we had a test which measures how sensitive the clitoris and the vagina are to small changes in temperature and to small changes in vibration. So if you have a normal sort of neurologically working genitalia you should be able to feel when the temperature starts going up and you can feel a very small change in temperature.

And if you have some kind of problem with, you are not able to sense sensation in, for example your vagina, you may enjoy intercourse less. You may not have orgasm because you can’t have the benefits of the intercourse.

So we thought these patients would have decreased sensation in their vagina, in their clitoral regions. Sure enough the sensation was also the same as the healthy people.

So we found that testosterone levels affects your interest in sex which is probably a brain mediated thing but not how your genitalia respond – two very different things.

I think this is going to sort of revolutionize how we look at testosterone and this may give an indication, we are still doing the study now, if we give testosterone back to women does their libido problems improve?

And we are still analyzing the data on that, But we hope once that comes out we will be able to recommend testosterone to women to help with their low libido issues.

About Dr. Theodore Friedman, M.D., Ph.D., M.Phil.:
Dr. Theodore Friedman, M.D., Ph.D., M.Phil., specializes in hard-to-diagnose-and- treat cases of adrenal, pituitary, thyroid, and fatigue disorders. He's been with the University of California Los Angeles School of Medicine since 2005 and serves as Chief of the Endocrinology, Metabolism and Molecular Medicine Division at Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science. He also served as Director of the Multi-Disciplinary Chronic Fatigue Clinic at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center from 1998-2000.

Dr. Friedman has a private practice near Beverly Hills, California as well as privileges at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and Martin Luther King Medical Center.

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