Derek (More Plates More Dates)

It doesn't mean that it's bad or good.

It's just worth noting like how much of a deterioration it has based on your dose because it's one of the proxies for kind of like androgenic activity.

shbg and your binding proteins like what's your baseline relative to after because if you are injecting infrequently or a dose that is

significantly suppressive like it might otherwise be a proxy for like using more than you might need not necessarily the case always but shbg will get suppressed dramatically by exogenous androgens in a dose dependent manner so it's not uncommon to see with bodybuilders who are using full-blown steroid cycles shbg levels in the single digits which is like you have essentially no regulation of androgenic signaling at that point it's just like everything's flying around

So with guys on TRT, it's like worth knowing where you stood to begin with and then how much it decreased because it's like if you didn't know the baseline to any of your diet changes at that point, the carb manipulations, the exercise change, the calorie intake change, the sleep.

You would have no idea what the impact thing was for sure that impacted the SHBG if you didn't have the baseline.

So.

What else as far as assessing?

Free T and total T measured through the accurate assays, which would be the gold standard for total testosterone is liquid chromatography with tandem mass spectrometry.

If you use an equilibrium, if you use a immunoassay test, which is like the cheaper version,

often it will be relatively inaccurate especially at lower like more low levels it is like notoriously inaccurate because the the very low numbers like you need to be more specific so like with women especially like you don't want to be messing around with immunoassay tests you want to be using sensitive assay estradiol every single time sensitive assay testing for total t

And for free testosterone, you don't want to be using a calculation.

Ideally, you would want to be measuring through equilibrium ultrafiltration or equilibrium dialysis, which are like actual measurements, not estimates based on calculations.

That's kind of what I would recommend.

And then estradiol is LC-MS as well, the same as what you use for total testosterone.

And what else?

Okay.

I'm probably missing some stuff.

Basic liver markers would be to have.

So the stuff that's going to get directly affected the most by androgens, though, is going to be like your gonadotropins, LH and FSH.