Mythbuster: Testosterone and Aggression

Feckless · #1 25th-November-2008

Quote:

Is testosterone really the hormone of aggression? Perhaps not.

(c) 1995 Copyright the News & Observer Publishing Co. (c) 1995 N.Y. Times News Service

WASHINGTON (Jun 20, 1995 - 08:54 EDT) -- Tired of hormone as cultural myth, as shorthand for swagger and machismo, ferocity and obnoxiousness, the bearskin beneath the three-piece suit?

Do the ubiquitous references to "testosterone poisoning" and "testosterone shock," to "testosterone-fueled heavy metal" and 'testosterone-crazed oppressors" make you feel a bit, well, testy?

Do you think it unfair to blame one lousy little chemical for war, dictatorships, crime, Genghis Khan, Gunga Din, Sly Stallone, the NRA, the NFL, Stormin' Norman Schwarzkopf and the tendency to interrupt in the middle of a sentence?

Ready to give the so-called male hormone a break and retire all testosterone cliches with a single pound of Iron John's drum?

Retire away. 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."

The commonly held belief that testosterone produces antisocial behavior "may be a misconception," he added.

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.

Considered together, the new work underscores how primitive is scientists' understanding of the effects of hormones on human and even animal behavior.

[...]

So far, there have been no good, controlled studies seeking to evaluate the effect of giving excess testosterone to androgenically normal men. In lieu of such studies are recent experiments comparing the mood states of hypogonadal men before and after treatment, like Dr. Wang's work. One missing element of this report, however, is a conventional control group -- seeing what happens to men with low testosterone if they are given a dummy medication rather than real testosterone. Do they, too, feel happier and friendlier?

Such an experiment would be unethical, said Dr. Wang, because hypogonadal men who visit the clinic are ill and need treatment to restore muscle and bone mass and healthy cholesterol levels. Denying them testosterone would be like denying a diabetic insulin.

Offering a partial explanation, Bremner and his colleagues reported in the June 1994 issue of The Journal of Clinical and Endocrinological Metabolism their results of seeing what happens to healthy men when they are artificially and temporarily brought to a state of low testosterone.
Some of the subjects were immediately given testosterone replacement, while others received dummy medication.

The study was mainly intended to look at the effects of testosterone on libido, but the researchers noted that the men with a drug-induced state of hypogonadism reported increased levels of aggression.

"Perhaps it made them uncomfortable or unhappy in a variety of ways, and that unhappiness registered itself as a high score on the aggression scale," Bremner said.

What Bremner's study and other reports found that does conform to stereotypical notions of the male hormone is that testosterone is profoundly important to a man's sex drive, though not to his mechanical abilities in bed.

Hypogonadal men report a sharp drop in sexual interest, which testosterone replacement quickly restores. The androgen may also play a role in female sexuality, and a growing number of menopausal women are asking that testosterone be added to their hormone replacement regimen to restore a lackluster libido. But the data linking sex drive and testosterone in women are fiercely debated.

Testosterone therapy also appears to give men and women more energy, vim, the desire to leap out of bed in the morning and embrace the demands of the day with can-do concentration. That zestiness is not the same as aggression, which if anything is often accompanied by poor concentration and underlying malaise, researchers said.

If testosterone qua testosterone is not the demonic potion of legend, its yangian counterpart, estrogen, may not be so innocent.

Reporting last month at the annual meeting of the American Pediatric Society, Dr. Jordan W. Finkelstein, Dr. Howard Kulin and their colleagues at Penn State University said that they compared the effects of giving estrogen therapy to girls who suffered from delayed onset of puberty with that of giving testosterone to boys who likewise were late in sexually maturing.

The girls showed earlier and larger increases in aggression than did the boys, until the boys received the last and highest dose of testosterone.
The researchers propose that for both sexes, the cause of the teen-age spike in aggressive and very likely insolent behavior is estrogen.

As scientists only lately are beginning to appreciate, most of the effect of testosterone on the brain is paradoxically estrogenic in nature.

That is because the brain is rich in the enzyme aromatase, which converts testosterone into estrogen. The newly transformed hormone then acts on the nerve cells of the brain through estrogen receptors, proteins designed specifically to link up with it.

A male's brain also has some receptors for testosterone, but they are far fewer in number or distribution, and the converting enzyme aromatase does not leave much testosterone around to hook up with these androgen receptors anyway.

Thus, in both boys and girls, as they reach adolescence and their respective sex hormones surge, the influence of either hormone on the brain and behavior probably works its dark art as estrogen.

In the Pennsylvania study, the girls may have had a jump on aggressive behavior over the boys because they were given direct injections of estrogen and therefore their brains did not need to go through the work of converting testosterone to estrogen.

[...]

Until then, perhaps it is time for a new hormonal cliche to explain aggression. How about this: The estrogen was so thick you couldn't beat it down with a rolling pin.

Testosterone Study

gaynorbarry · #2 25th-November-2008

there have been a number of studies which makes similiar concludions (I believe they have been posted here). Which indicates the possibility that aggressive males may in fact be acting more like women who lack testesterone, who traditionally (not so these days) had greater social constraints and less muscle power to stop them acting out their aggresion in a physical manner.

Marx · #3 25th-November-2008

Quote:

Originally Posted by gaynorbarry

(I believe they have been posted here)

Hmm, wouldn't it be nice if we had a specific area to post nothing but studies, where they could all be arranged in order.

Gee, if only we had such a section.

Feckless · #4 25th-November-2008

Quote:

Originally Posted by Marx

Hmm, wouldn't it be nice if we had a specific area to post nothing but studies, where they could all be arranged in order.

Gee, if only we had such a section.

Excactly....couldn´t you simply create such an area? Sheesh Marx!

(ducks and runs away fast)

**christianj** · #5 26th-November-2008

Call in the LINKMEISTER

paul parmenter · #6 26th-November-2008

These findings are wholly consistent with what the enlightened know of the true state of society. Females are consistently the more angry, dissatisfied and violently aggressive sex.

brian44 · #7 26th-November-2008

Quote:

Originally Posted by paul parmenter

These findings are wholly consistent with what the enlightened know of the true state of society. Females are consistently the more angry, dissatisfied and violently aggressive sex.

Typical Friday and Saturday nights near where I live would totally back that up. Come to think of it, my ex-wife's left hook would back that up even more

**Percy** · #8 26th-November-2008

Injections of Common Decency (or Ouzo ) might do some good, too.

lolintertubes · #9 26th-November-2008

Quote:

Originally Posted by Marx

Hmm, wouldn't it be nice if we had a specific area to post nothing but studies, where they could all be arranged in order.

Gee, if only we had such a section.

My sarcasm detector just exploded in my face. Thanks Karl you owe me a new 'un.

Marx · #10 26th-November-2008

Quote:

Originally Posted by Feckless

Excactly....couldn´t you simply create such an area? Sheesh Marx!

(ducks and runs away fast)

Quote:

Originally Posted by lolintertubes

My sarcasm detector just exploded in my face. Thanks Karl you owe me a new 'un.

You're both quite, quite welcome

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Mythbuster: Testosterone and Aggression

Mythbuster: Testosterone and Aggression

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