Transcription
Hi, it’s Dr. Centeno, and today we’re going to talk about whether or not hormone replacement therapy or in this case testosterone therapy can improve stem cell function. Now we see all the time out there that many clinics are advertising that they can make your stem cells better by putting you on hormones.
Now, the question is, is any of this true? And the first question is, is there anything published out there that says that this is true, meaning? Has anyone done this and found that stem cells got better? And the answer to that is “No!” There’s no published data that shows that putting you on hormones, whether you be male or female, will improve your stem cells. Now, we actually did this study a number of years ago, and we did it because we really thought it was going to work and we thought we’d be putting all of our patients on hormone replacement therapy before a stem cell procedure.
So, what do we try to do? This was back in 2013 and 14, we put patients, –males since they are the easiest to correct on a three-month testosterone injection weekly. And then we looked at their stem cell function before and after that treatment. Now, regrettably, we didn’t find what we expected to find. I’m still an advocate for hormone supplementation, but not to improve stem cells. So we had 20 patients. These are the inclusion-exclusion criteria.
Basically, older men. And on this slide, we did four different conditions here experimentally in the lab with 20 patients, but really this is pre hormone supplementation. This is post hormone supplementation. So those are the two groups that should focus on as we go through this data. And we looked at lots of different things, everything from how the cells grew to how they repaired cartilage, to how they handled a hit with regard to inflammation. Lots of different things.
I’m only going to go over here. The yield in cell health.
So, the pilot study of four patients looked pretty good, maybe we were seeing some increase in stem cells in these patients. So that was a reason to continue.
And again, the college ance genes with regard to cartilage production look good. So then we expanded and we added 16 patients to the original four patients. And regrettably, this is where it all fell apart. So if we looked at total nuclides, cell counts and this was the total number of cells in their bone marrow before and after this testosterone program, you know, in some patients, their cells went up and some patients went down. It was kind of a wash.
But our real focus here was on the number of stem cells in their bone marrow. Would that go up? So these are the stem cell counts after eleven days and culture before and afterward, as you can see here, for most of these patients, the stem cell counts are going down, not up. We had a few patients where they went up. But the bottom line is that most the patients saw a drop in their stem cell number from being on testosterone.
Now, this is just some of the stats to support all of that. And then we looked at the. Basically, a sell health measure called Presto Blue. And what you want to look at here is, again, this pre-press group, which is this group here vs. the post group, which is this group here. And so solohealth went down when they were placed on testosterone. This is only their stem cell health. All the other cells may have been doing great.
I’m just looking at mesenchymal stem cells in the bone marrow. And metabolic activity also from this one here to that one there went down. So, again, not what we wanted to see. So the differences between the pilot study and the expanded study, we use cultured cells where we kept them in cultural longer and we differentiated them towards cartilage and regrettably didn’t see any improvement in cartilage production in the bigger group.
So in conclusion, the stem cell number or health was not helped by testosterone supplementation, as far as I know, this is the only study that I’m aware of that’s looked at this issue in detail.
Hence, clinics that are out there claiming that hormone replacement therapy helps your stem cells have really no data to stand on at this point. They should do some research like we did on this topic. And obviously, if they find something different, that’s great. But so far, this is not supported by science. Thanks so much. Have a great day.
Originally Published on Dr. Centeno’s YouTube Channel with the same name, “Testosterone and Stem Cells.”