Testosterone for Heart Attack

There is no cure for angina pectoris (heart attack), which afflicts hundreds of thousands in the U.S.. but its agonizing pains have been relieved in a number of cases by injections of testosterone propionate, a male sex hormone. So reported Dr. Leslie Hamm of Boston in the current issue of the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology, in a review of his own work and that of Dr. Maurice Aaron Lesser.

One of the most excruciating ailments known to medicine, angina usually comes on after an emotional shock or physical effort. It often follows the same pattern: a piercing stab in the shoulder, a "squeezing" of the heart, lightning pains down the left arm, a drenching sweat, and over it all, a terrible sense of impending death. According to prevailing theory, angina is caused by constriction of the heart's blood vessels which cuts down the supply of fresh blood at the very time when it is most needed.

To expand their tightened arteries when an attack starts, victims of angina carry with them tiny pills (containing from 0.0003 to 0.0006 of a gram) of nitroglycerin. These work in a flash, but their effect does not last long.

Last year, on the hunch that testosterone propionate increases the flow of blood in the heart, Dr. Lesser injected minuscule amounts of the hormone into the muscles of 24 angina patients (including four women), whose ages ranged from 40 to 77. Injections were given every second to fifth day, depending on the number and severity of the attacks. After receiving from five to 25 injections, all the patients improved. Some had no attacks for as long as twelve months after their last injection. (The women did not do as well as the men.)

Dr. Hamm gave injections of the hormone to seven old men with the same good results. All showed "a general improvement in mental and physical endurance." One man of 75, who for five years could not walk hall a block after lunch without an attack, now walks four or five blocks with no trouble. Others climb several flights of stairs, work longer hours, have a complexion of "healthy pink" instead of grey. The injections of the hormone are so small, said Dr. Hamm, that none of the old men felt any sexual stimulation. Unlike the "dynamite" pills, testosterone works very gradually, gives no relief during an attack. After their first course of injections, most patients need a maintenance dosage of one a month.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.