Testosterone, total
Reads: Testosterone
The Balance here is Between Goals — and between people. Raising it helps eight things: muscle mass and recovery, bone density, sexual function, urinary function, male fertility and hormonal health, and desire in women. It costs seven: DHT rises, and with it prostate load, acne and follicular oxidative stress; in women it pushes toward pcos and hormonal imbalance. This is the one node Where the Right Answer Genuinely Differs by sex. For a man past fifty the balance usually favors building it; for a woman the same move carries the androgen-excess costs. The map cannot pick for you, and it should not pretend to.
What this marker reads
Serum testosterone — the anabolic signal behind muscle, drive and libido in men. The evidence shows a finding that overturns the common story: suppression under stress is centrally mediated — the brain down-regulating the axis — 'despite intact gonadal capacity'. The organ is rarely the problem.
What a named body publishes
Each line below is the sentence the issuing body wrote, carried with its own identifier. Nothing here interprets your result — it states what was published, for whom, and by whom.
Total testosterone
“The paper's stated conclusion is that the 'Harmonized normal range in a healthy nonobese population of European and American men, 19 to 39 years, is 264 to 916 ng/dL' (2.5th to 97.5th percentile of total testosterone, assays cross-calibrated to the CDC reference method).” males, 19-39
Harmonized Reference Ranges for Circulating Testosterone Levels in Men of Four Cohort Studies in the United States and Europe · The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism · 2017 DOI 10.1210/jc.2016-2935 · PMID 28324103
Your laboratory reads your result against its own assay, and this page does not do that for it. What is above is what a named body published and for whom; the machinery this marker reads is set out on its pathway page, and the formulas witnessed on it are below.
The machinery behind it
What raises this marker and what it goes on to move — each edge carried with its own study — is set out in full on its pathway page: Testosterone →
Formulas that modulate it
Each formula page names this pathway and carries the study behind its claim.
Build a combo from your panel
Open the bloodwork builder and select every marker your lab flagged — it covers the most machinery with the fewest formulas.