Taking steroids by definition reduces your body’s own testosterone production, underground handbooks will tell you. Well, not necessarily. In the 1990s Greek endocrinologists at the Elena Venizelou Hospital published the results of a study in which they had given men light doses that increased the body’s own testosterone production.
Testicle size worries? Try a cycle of tamoxifen + Andriol
Testicle size worries? Try a cycle of tamoxifen + Andriol
In an article published in Fertility & Sterility in 1997, the Greeks describe an experiment they did with eighty men who had low sperm counts. Some of them were given fake medicine – the placebo group. Another group were given 10 mg tamoxifen, the active ingredient in Nolvadex, twice a day. The third group were given three capsules a day containing 40 mg of testosterone undecanoate, the active ingredient in Andriol. [The structures of both these are shown above.] The last group took both tamoxifen and testosterone-undecanoate. The researchers measured the hormone levels in the men’s blood and their sperm quality after three and six months.
The researchers reported that there was quite a difference in the values for testosterone and for FSH – a messenger hormone that triggers the production of testosterone in the testes. But from the patchy information they give, we’ve managed to put together the table below. The picture is clear, but not all trends are statistically significant. T= tamoxifen; T+A = tamoxifen + Andriol.
In the bottom row you can see that the combination of Andriol and tamoxifen not only results in a higher testosterone level, but also in more FSH. So it is possible: to take androgens and at the same time stimulate the pituitary< and the testes to produce more testosterone. When a cycle of steroids is taken the testes usually shrink in size. But during this trial the volume of the testes actually increased. In the graph below the solid line represents the testes volume of the placebo group. The line with dots and dashes represents the Andriol group. The line with long dashes represents the tamoxifen group, and the line with short dashes represents the men who took Andriol + tamoxifen.
The men also produced more sperm as a result of the treatment, and the combination of Andriol and tamoxifen was most effective.
Now, an oral dose of 120 mg of testosterone-undecanoate is of little interest to athletes. But maybe it’s also possible to keep the axis up if instead of taking Andriol you take a more effective anabolic steroid, that places relatively little pressure on the axis. Say, stanozolol or oxandrolone.
Source: http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=2638887