14 DAY TRIAL // A team of Chinese scientists along with a Saint Louis University geriatrician, carried on a research that suggested that low testosterone levels could be related to Alzheimer's disease.
The study focused on 153 Chinese men, recruited from social centers, who were at least 55 years old, were part of the community and did not have dementia.
47 of them had moderate cognitive impairment, or problems with clear thinking and memory loss.
A year after the beginning of the study, 10 men out of the 47 with mild cognitive impairment developed probable Alzheimer's disease.
The researchers noticed that these men also had a low level of testosterone in their body tissue, very high levels of ApoE 4 (apolipoprotein E) protein, which has already been linked to higher risks of Alzheimer's and high blood pressure.
John E. Morley, MD, director of the division of geriatric medicine at Saint Louis University and a study co-investigator, said that “it's a very exciting study because we've shown that a low level of testosterone is one of the risk factors for Alzheimer's disease.
These conclusions comfort previous studies of older Caucasian men that concluded that a low level of testosterone is related to impaired thinking and Alzheimer's disease, and suggest that testosterone could have a protective value against Alzheimer's.
Morley said that “having low testosterone may make you more vulnerable to Alzheimer's disease.
“The take-home message is we should pay more attention to low testosterone, particularly in people who have memory problems or other signs of cognitive impairment.”
The next step for scientists is to carry out a large-scale study that would evaluate the role of testosterone use in preventing Alzheimer's disease.
This way, if the results are positive, testosterone replacement in older men who have both mild memory issues and low testosterone could be useful against the disease.
This research was led by Leung-Wing Chu, MD, the chief of the division of geriatric medicine at Queen Mary Hospital at the University of Hong Kong, and published online in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease.