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Dr. Sarrel discusses how women can learn more about the hormones in their bodies.
Dr. Sarrel:
Probably the best place is on the Web. She should go www.testosterone or just Google ”testosterone” and she will learn everything that anyone knows because that’s just the most wonderful source of information for us.
When I wanted to learn about testosterone and the other androgens I had started out, this is maybe 15 years ago or 12 years ago, already a professor in the field of women’s health in gynecology, endocrinology, but I took a whole year at that point in my life. This was after 35 years of being a professor, and I took a whole year just to study testosterone and the other androgens.
So it depends on what level you want to go for. It took me an entire year of about five hours in the library almost every week sitting there learning about everything I could learn about. The starting point of understanding androgens in women is in the mid-1930s.
So we come, it was always known, I found a beautiful paper from 1756 that describes a condition in women that’s due to too much androgens where there’s too much hair growth, and the bones in her head change, and she can become severely enraged and distressed, and so on.
All of these are hyper–too much androgen effects. That was first described in 1756, and it was due to a condition in the ovaries. And they were smart enough, and this was in Italy, a man named Morgani was smart enough to figure out that this weird condition of too much androgen or testosterone effect in women was due to something going on in her ovaries.
But the modern era, which starts in the 1930s and starts with the German scientists in their laboratories, isolates testosterone in women and it tells us that, in fact, women are making it every day, so by the mid-1930s it was named testosterone; 1935 it was given its name.
And within three or four years they were figuring out how to prepare it in the laboratory in a tablet that could be given to someone who might need it. So we have about 80 years, 70 years of current history.
About Dr. Sarrel, M.D.:
Philip M. Sarrel, M.D., completed his medical education at New York University School of Medicine, his internship at the Mount Sinai Hospital, and his residency at Yale New Haven Hospital. In addition to his many years on the faculty of the Departments of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine, Dr. Sarrel has also been a Faculty Scholar in the department of psychiatry at Oxford University, Visiting Senior Lecturer at King’s College Hospital Medical School at the University of London, Visiting Professor in Cardiac Medicine at the National Heart and Lung Institute in London, and Visiting Professor in the Department of Medicine at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York. He is currently Emeritus Professor of obstetrics, gynecology, and psychiatry at Yale University.