Derek (More Plates More Dates)

So as far as fertility goes, yeah, like you will absolutely crush your fertility pretty significantly, if not entirely, depending on some things.

So intratesticular testosterone is a significant mediator of spermatogenesis.

So

it's not uncommon even for bodybuilders who are on huge amounts of steroids to still accidentally get their wives girlfriends pregnant thinking that they're sterile when in fact they have so much testosterone in their body that it's like actually like producing the spermatogenesis effect via the exogenous hormone what that does the epigenetics all that stuff no idea

would freak me out of it.

Well, like it's, it happens.

And it's like on paper, these guys should be a completely infertile, but still see accidental pregnancies all the time in the bodybuilding world.

So I wouldn't rely on that as a means of a contraception as a guy, first of all.

Um, but you will almost certainly have like inhibited to like horrifically low, if not a zoo spermic level fertility, if you were on even just like baseline replacement, because, um,

you are shutting down the signaling from your brain that otherwise dictates the intratesticular activity.

So by that, I mean the hypothalamus releases the GnRH, the gonadotropin-releasing hormone.

So it's the hormone that...

causes the release of gonadotropins, hence the name.

At the pituitary gland, the pituitary responds to that GnRH to then produce the gonadotropins, which are the luteinizing hormone, LH, and the FSH follicle-stimulating hormone, just like in women, goes down to the gonads, and the thing that happens is you produce intratesticular testosterone at the lytic cell,

And women do too.

It's just theca cells instead of, you know, lytic cells.

And that intratesticular testosterone mediates spermatogenesis in unison with the Sertoli cells, which are also supported by follicle-stimulating hormone.

So if you have...

exogenous testosterone so like you're administering it yourself synthetically you have basically told your brain i have enough estrogen and testosterone via this injection i'm doing or whatever it is so you can not produce any more gnrh because like why would we need you to or we have enough hormones like okay well let's turn that off let's turn off as a result we have no signal to produce pituitary hormones or the the gonadotropin so we turn that off and now you have no signaling to your testes so now you're just like

literal organ atrophy is occurring because there's no signaling happening there.