Derek (More Plates More Dates)

It's also about like,

the real health benefits that you're seeking not just from a symptom relief aspect but also from like you know what's your fasting insulin now is it like way better because you have more muscle mass on your body like if not like you know there's things to be had that are going to be net beneficial from a health standpoint not just like a cosmetic and like i don't know sexual health standpoint that should be monitored regularly and i think one of the key things is just making sure you have a good baseline because it's like once you

A lot of people make the mistake of like this is kind of like mediated by default through us.

Like you have to get a baseline to even like see where you're at before you would get even recommended to do anything.

But a lot of people, they get on hormones before they have a baseline and then they just like don't know what they're looking at after they're on it.

And you've shut down your system via hormones and you're trying to like retroactively figure out what happened and what went wrong.

It's pretty difficult to see what like the change was that was marked and like significant that led you to where you are that might be, you know, a problem.

So.

if you have like a reasonably comprehensive baseline that assesses the hematology, um, a CMP that assesses your kidney, uh, status via cystatin C estimated GFR or, um, a, uh, SDMA, which is like a, uh, uh, symmetric, um, is it,

Symmetric, it's another marker, more progressive marker for kidney function that is a proxy for inulin clearance with relative accuracy, which is like the gold standard of actual GFR for kidney filtration capacity.

I forget what it stands for, but you can just type in ADMA and STMA and you'll see what the acronyms stand for.

I think you've talked about it on your show, too.

Yeah, one of them is like asymmetric dimethyl originate and one's, yeah.

So one of them assesses vasodilation potential and one is more of like for cardiovascular and one is more of like a kidney marker that is equivalent or slightly better than cystatin C estimated GFR, which is not influenced by muscle mass creatinine intake or the array of things that can cause transient, complete like...

to the point of it being unusable changes in the marker because creatinine calculated EGFR, the amount of guys I've seen think that they're on borderline like death's door of kidney failure from a creatinine that's high because they're, you know, a muscle-bound guy who takes creatine and like works out hard or whatever.

It's like...

It's startling that this isn't more widely known.

So either of those two kind of like strong proxies for inulin clearance.

You have your kind of like metabolic parameters to see your insulin sensitivity, hemoglobin A1C, you know, all the kind of basics.

I think the lipid panel, definitely a baseline HDL to see how much it gets lowered by the dose of testosterone you're using because you will likely see a suppression if you are elevating your testosterone beyond what you were at.