Testosteron

Bla'bla, Thursday, 31.08.2006, 01:57 (vor 7038 Tagen)

Ein interessanter Artikel aus der New York Times (ich glaube die Studie wurde in Hoffmanns Buch zitiert:

"...As it turns out, testosterone may not be the dread
"hormone of aggression" that researchers and the popular imagination
have long had it. It may not be the substance that drives men to behave
with quintessential guyness, to posture, push, yelp, belch, punch and
play air-guitar.

If anything, this most freighted of hormones may be a source of very
different sensations: calmness, happiness and friendliness, for
example.

Friendliness???

Reporting in Washington last week at the annual meeting of the
Endocrine Society, researchers said that it was a deficiency of
testosterone, rather than its excess, that could lead to all the
negative behaviors normally associated with the androgen.

Studying a group of 54 so-called hypogonadal men, who for a variety of
reasons were low in testosterone, Dr. Christina Wang of the University
of California in Los Angeles and her colleagues, found that before
treatment, the men expressed a surprising suite of negative emotions.

They did not feel passive or depressed or timid, as standard ideas of
testosterone deficiency might predict. Instead, they described feelings
of edginess, anger, irritability. Aggression.

When the men were given testosterone replacement therapy, and were
asked to complete questionnaires about their moods several times over
the course of two months of treatment, their general sense of
well-being improved markedly. Their anger and agitation decreased,
their sense of optimism and friendliness heightened.

"Every parameter we looked at went in the same direction," Dr. Wang
said. "The positive mood increased, the negative mood decreased."

Dr. Willis K. Samson, a professor and chairman of physiology at the
University of North Dakota School of Medicine, said, "Testosterone has
been given such a negative knock. Work like this helps show the up side
of this very important male hormone.

Dr. Wang's work is in keeping with similar findings from other
laboratories that question how relevant testosterone is to human
aggression.

Some studies even indicate another, improbable source of aggression:
estrogen. Yes, the gal hormone.

Other work presented at the meeting showed that when male mice were
genetically deprived of their ability to respond to estrogen, they lost
a lot of their natural aggressiveness, becoming much less likely to
fight with other males or to display the general paranoia exhibited by
ordinary male rodents ......
"

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=990CE7DD103DF933A15755C0A963958260