quality testosterone research?

[novice1]

i was wondering where i could find some quality research on testosterone and other steroids like primo. i have read every profile on every website and message board there is but i want to read some REAL research and not some post from some amature on the internet. i heard once you take test your natural levels will never return to exactly what they were before and i want to read some full proof reseach about this. i also want to read some REAL research about primo and its effects on natural test levels. if anybody has any good sites or other reputable sources of info please let me know. thanks.

[TNT]

Excellent questions, Novice1, except that you're forcing me to abandon my dumb jock image and provide an intellectual perspective. (Damn.)

I'll give you some references, but let's place the picture in perspective first . . .

You're right - you're not going to have too much luck finding what you're looking for on the AS boards. Virtually everything that you'll see on the AS boards is written from an anecdotal perspective. Much has been written based on personal experience, and many of the articles are reliable in that context, but they are not supported by what we would normally think of as clinical research using a sufficient representative or randomized sample - no "double blind" studies, for lack of a better term. The information you'll find is valuable, since AS use from a BB perspective is often (though not always) best written by those with experience.

However, yet another problem with the boards is that we generally do not know which writers have actual clinical qualifications and which do not. Face it, most of us write anonymously. We do not include biographical sketches, and while some board members have profiles, they are rarely complete. Even when a user uses a title like "Doctor X," you have no idea whether that person has an M.D. degree or a mail-order religion degree.

So what we're left with is reading as much as we can and using common sense, keeping in mind the cardinal rule: that any article associated with a product is ultimately designed to sell that product (which means we can toss the reliability of the article by the wayside immediately).

Now, when it comes specifically to testosterone . . .

Most of the article you will find in reliable sources do not address testosterone as much as they address the traditional underlying medical reasons for using test, conditions such as hypogonadism, delayed puberty, sexual dysfunction, or peripheral conditions like diabetes or other medications that result in low test levels. There have also been several recent studies that address andropause (the male equivalent to menopause), the lowering of test levels with age; most of these articles are written under the umbrella topic called Androgen Replacement Therapy.

Even though you might be inetested in using test from a BB or AS perspective, these articles are still very useful, since they discuss the clinical effects of test and the precautions that one should take when using test (such as what lab work to have done to rule out any negative effects).

All that said, here are a few articles I recommend:

Androgen Replacement Therapy for Male Hypogonadism, a continuing education program for physicians, pharmacists, nurses, and other health care professionals. This is an actual CME (continuing medical education) course, and includes many citations to other reliable clinical articles dealing with testosterone. You'll find it at http://www.powerpack.com/CE/Androgen/lesson.cfm.

Andropause: Clinical Features and Therapeutic Options, another article with several citations to other sources, at http://www.theberries.ns.ca/Archives/andropause.html.

Testosterone Replacement Therapy, written by a physician at the Tulane University Medical Center. It's from the Digital Urology Journal, at http://www.duj.com/Article/Hellstrom2/Hellstrom2.html.

Are You Man Enough? A feature article from Time magazine (4/24/00). It's not a clinical article, but provides a comprehensive general perspective on test that has gone through a reliable journalistic editorial process. You'll find it at http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...,43142,00.html.

AACE Clinical Practice Guidelines, published by the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. These are the actual treatment guidelines for several conditions addressed by endocrinologists, and the guidelines for The Evaluation and Treatment of Hypogonadism in Adult Male Patients has a lot of info on testosterone. You can download it as a PDF file at [url]http://www.aace.com/clin/guidelines[url].

Again, even though most of these articles deal with androgen replacement therapy on the whole, it's the bibliographic and research citations in them that will lead you to more specific articles dealing with clinical studies involving testosterone.

As far as articles on other steroids, the first thing you should do is a search on steroids in general (which will yield thousands of results) or specific drug names in a search engine like Yahoo. Keep in mind that, unlike most medical issues, in which (anecdotally) 50% of the articles may be reliable and 50% may be quackery, when it comes to AS the percentage is more like 10% reliable and 90% quackery. Therefore, stick with articles that appear on reliable web sites, such as those of medical colleges, and avoid [i]all/i] articles associated with products or with individual medical centers or medical practices.

An additional and very reliable source for clinical articles of all types: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hinfo.html, the contents page for the U.S. National Library of Medicine, a division of the National institutes of Health. Two sub-pages of this site are great for searches: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed, the bibliographic database of the National Institutes of Health - about as solid as you can get, and http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus, the searchable database for MedLine.

Another fun one: The Lancet, a prestigious British medical journal (equivalent to the U.S. New England Journal of Medicine), at http://www.thelancet.com/login. Registration on the bibliographic database is free. If you want reliable articles on clinical studies and AS effects, the medical journals are the place to go. Do a search on "anabolic steroids" (include the quotation marks), and you'll see a sampling of some very cool, very reliable stuff.

Finally, if you have any medical schools nearby, call their libraries and check on whether they allow public access (some do, some don't, some do but only during certain hours, etc.). You can find most of the articles cited elsewhere in actual print form in the various medical journals right in the "stacks" at any medical school library. (Yeah, guys, I know - you've just learned a new meaning of the word stack.) Many of them also have bibliographic computers that use databases that are not even available on the web.

On any database, remember that you can also do searches that address your specific questions. For example, try a search on "primobolan and testosterone" (again, in quotes, so you pick up any articles that have both terms rather than either term).

In short, there is a wealth of clinical, reliable information out there, and I applaud you, Novice1, on your interest in finding information that's more than anecdotal.

Now, enough of this intellectual shit - I'm gonna go pump some weights.