Dr. Mary Claire Haver

That is a very good way of putting it.

So when we study cognition, there's the shopping list memory test.

There's the how did you perform on this verbal recall test.

There's lots of different tests.

And what you're going to find is in the testosterone studies where people were given testosterone and then asked to perform various tasks, you're going to see a big variety in whether or not they got a benefit.

So one study will say

Okay, they had, you know, verbal memory recall was better, but the shopping list recall wasn't.

If you gave them numbers, they remembered it, but then the shopping wasn't.

And they get these really granular outcomes.

If you look at all the cognition studies together and you look at was this, quote, statistically significant, that means does it look like if there's a benefit, could it have not been due to chance?

Almost all the studies show that any benefit could have also been due to chance when it comes to cognition.

That's my takeaway from what the evidence shows.

But I always talk about the difference between group data and individual data, right?

If a woman tells me I started taking testosterone and I felt like I could remember my shopping list better and I could remember where I put my keys and that brain fog went away, I'm not going to tell her that that's not true.

I think you can say that the studies of 100 women, and this is where I know that the other people listening here who go based on all the studies are going to be like, how can you say this?

Well, this is group data.

If you take 100 women, you give 50 of them a placebo and 50 of them the medication, there's going to be 20 women in that medication group that did get better.

And maybe in the placebo group, there's a similar amount.

That doesn't mean those 20 women didn't get better.

And so if you look at an individual, they may see an improvement, but across an entire group of people, you didn't see the signal that met significance.