Maybe Testosterone Replacement Is Not the Answer

I have advocated for testosterone replacement for men with low or even low-normal testosterone levels for many years. More and more doctors have gotten on board with that approach despite a very vocal minority of doctors who consider it dangerous or non-effective.

Some of the symptoms of low testosterone include muscle loss and strength decline, cognitive decline, cardiovascular disease, decreased libido, erectile dysfunction, depression, decreased masculinity, fat gain, metabolic disorders, decreased energy and work performance, and even height loss due to loss of bone density.

Unless the man is concerned about fertility, the usual method of replacement is a transdermal gel or cream, and some of the better known products are AndroGel, Axiron, Testim, and Fortesta. In younger men concerned about fertility, testosterone injections are given every two weeks or up to every three months, depending on the form.

Some of the risks of testosterone therapy include growth of prostate cancer and breast cancer, worsened symptoms of benign prostatic hypertrophy, liver toxicity and liver tumor (only with oral administration), gynecomastia (breast tissue growth), erythrocytosis (thickening of blood due to increased red blood cell production), testicular atrophy and infertility, skin diseases (usually only with the patch), and new or exacerbated sleep apnea.

Most or all of these can be managed with an aromatase inhibitor to prevent the conversion of testosterone to estrogen and with maintaining moderate T levels as opposed to high-normal.

For a good overview of the benefits and risks, The benefits and risks of testosterone replacement therapy: A review by Nazem Bassil, Saad Alkaade, and John E Morley (2009) is a an excellent open access paper (Ther Clin Risk Manag.; 5: 427–448).

All of this brings me to the point of this post - there might be another way to get the benefits while reducing the risks.

Dr. William Llewellyn often researches and writes about hormone manipulation in athletes (body builders mostly) and the general public - his team offers testosterone therapy for aging men. He recently posted an article that summarizes some new research on using aromatase inhibitors to reduce estrogen and increase testosterone, without the risks of t-replacement therapy. Better yet, these can be taken as a daily pill with no liver risks, and no injections to worry about.

Arimidex vs. Femara for increasing testosterone in men (HRT)

June 5, 2012 By William Llewellyn

Testosterone medications like AndroGel, Axiron, Testim, and Fortesta are the products most widely prescribed to treat age related hormone decline in men, a condition know as andropause or adult hypogonadism. However, direct hormone replacement is not ideal for all patients. This often includes men looking to maintain fertility, or those with low testosterone caused by excess estrogen. To better treat such cases, a number of alternate therapies are being investigated. Several of these involve anti-estrogenic or aromatase-inhibiting drugs, which can raise testosterone levels by lowering the activity of estrogen. This works because estrogen is a strong inhibiting signal towards testosterone synthesis in men. When estrogen levels go up, testosterone drops.

Researchers at the Aretaieion Hospital in Athens Greece recently completed a study comparing the use of Femara (letrozole) and Arimidex (anastrozole) in men with low testosterone, which are two of the more potent and modern aromatase inhibitors. The study involved infertile men (n=29), all having testosterone concentrations below 300 ng/dL and a T/E ratio under 10. The men were divided into two groups, each given either 1 mg of anastrozole or 2.5 mg of letrozole per day. The medications were continued for six months. At the end of therapy, basic health markers were compared to baseline, including hormone levels and sperm density. The data is presented in the tables below.

The results in this study appeared to be promising for both drugs. Sperm density was improved in 73.4% of the men taking letrozole, and 78.6% for those using anastrozole. Testosterone was substantially improved for both groups as well. With men taking letrozole, testosterone increased from 275 ng/dL to 495 ng/dL on average, an 80% bump. With anastrozole, the average testosterone level went from 265 ng/dL to 513 ng/dL, or a 94% increase. Side effects were mild and transient, including GI upset, lethargy, headache, and liver enzyme elevations in a small number of patients. Both drugs were deemed “well tolerated”, and none of the participants were forced to discontinue treatment.

No comparative conclusions could be drawn in this study. Letrozole and anastrozole appeared equally effective at treating men with low testosterone, infertility, and low T/E ratio. There are still questions that need to be answered, especially when it comes to the long-term safety of this type of therapy. In particular, there are some concerns with a potential loss of bone mineral density, or elevations in serum cholesterol and cardiovascular disease risk. Still, the results here were promising, and add to a series of other positive studies with men taking AI drugs for low testosterone. The present researchers have furthered this discussion by recommending the use of T/E ratio as an additional diagnostic tool. A ratio below 10:1 would identify those hypogonadal men that might benefit from aromatase inhibitor therapy.

Source: Fertil Steril. 2012 May 11. [Epub ahead of print]

 

Why Do We Hate Athletes Who Cheat?

Armstrong gives Jan Ullrich "The Look" as he passed him on the final climb of L'Alpe d'Huez after feigning fatigue (2001 Tour de France)

Lance Armstrong may be one of the few "guilty as sin" athletes not to be totally rejected by his fan base. In baseball, people like Mark McGuire, Sammy Sosa, Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez, and Roger Clemons, to name only a few, lost a lot of their fans and likely any chance at being elected to the Hall of Fame because of performance enhancing drugs (PED).

Interestingly, this is less true in the NFL, where I have little doubt that the athletes are at least using testosterone injections. The "random" test is on the day of or day after the game, so you piss in a cup and go get your shot. Testosterone levels will be back to normal by the next week's game, and you will have healed quicker and better than you could have without the drug.

We seem to get - consciously or not - that modern professional football might be a sport that demands drug use. On the other hand, it's a sport set up to facilitate PEDs, and when someone does get caught, it is generally not a top-tier player.

So why do we get bent out of shape about athletes using PEDs? Why does it warrant hearings in Congress (which is a complete and total farce and waste of tax dollars)? Why will Barry Bonds, who was probably the best hitter the game has seen and holder of the career home run record, never make it into the hall of fame?

Here is one possibility:

Athletes must work "near the edges of endurance and the outer fringes of metabolic stability. Conditioning and diet allow the athlete to engage at the highest levels of human body performance, incredibly close to the breakdown points of cardiovascular, respiratory, and digestive systems. With the body close to its limits, the pressures, and the years of effort and expense for training all on the line, it is no wonder that some of our heroes suppress these intense feelings by succumbing to performance-enhancing and pain-relieving drugs. The surprise is that we are disappointed in them when they are found out, not because we are doing any better in holding it all together without prescribed or recreational pharmaceutical support, but because the weakness of the hero exposes our own insufficiencies and guilty sedations."  

~ Alan Fogel, The Psychophysiology of Self-Awareness: Rediscovering the Lost Art of Body Sense

Maybe Fogel is correct, maybe if we see our heroes falter, see them as human beings like ourselves, it reminds us that we too are flawed. It seems most people in this country would do anything to avoid those feelings.

I think part of the reason I support drug use in sports, however, is because I can identify with them. I have been an athlete. I know how hard it can be to stay in peak condition for months at a time, fighting off injuries, fatigue, and other stress. I've played four or five full 90-minute, tournament-level soccer games in a single 3-day weekend, and if there was drug I could have taken back then to perform better, I might have done it.

When I watch the three major cycling races (Giro d'Italia, Tour de France, Vuelta a Espana), I have no idea how they could ride for three weeks at the speeds they do without PEDs. It's no wonder there are more cyclists suspended for PEDs than in any other sport on the planet.

We held up Lance Armstrong as an almost super human hero - until we found out that he too is mortal. Then we judge him and take away his victories, in itself a silly decision since all the other contenders in those races were also using PEDs.

We, as a nation, cannot understand the pain he endured to win those races because we cannot bear the pain of our daily lives.


We are a nation drugged on sugar, tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, methamphetamine, antidepressants, tranquilizers, sedatives, narcotics, and on and on, what right do we have judge athletes who use PEDs to be the best in their particular sport?

The athletes at least have a goal - we are just numbing ourselves to avoid life.

Back in March of 2011, I posted an article about NBA star Dwyane Wade's custody battle with his ex-wife, and the rather rare outcome of his victory. This was my introduction to the article:

It took a long court battle - one of the longest in Cook County history and one most men could not afford - for Dwyane Wade to win custody of his children from his (less than sane) ex-wife. She did everything she could do to destroy Wade's reputation, including accusations that Wade and his current girlfriend had sex in front of the children (as well as accusations of "parental alienation"). The judge ruled that Siohvaughn Wade’s (the ex-wife) "ability and/or willingness to ease these children through a transition" is seriously in question. Ya think?

Here is some of the article about the case and Wade's response:

“I am very thankful that the court has given me custody of my boys and they are already at home with me in Miami and settling in,” the Miami Heat guard said in a statement. “Going through a custody trial was difficult and I wish it hadn’t been necessary, but, I felt it was the only way that I could continue to play an active part of my kids’ lives and provide them with a happy and stable home. My hope is that their mother will also choose to play a healthy role in their lives and we can all move on from this in a positive way.”

Cook County Circuit Judge Renee Goldfarb issued a 102-page ruling late Friday.

“This is a very difficult decision for this court,” her ruling reads. “This will be an abrupt change for the children. However, this court has very grave reservations about (Siohvaughn Wade’s) ability and/or willingness to ease these children through a transition.”

Just this last June (2012), the ex-wife was charged with child abduction for allegedly failing to return their sons, ages 10 and 5, to Wade as scheduled over the Father's Day weekend. She took the 5th to avoid self-incrimination in the hearing. Wade, who has sole custody, is now seeking termination of her visitation rights since this is the not first time she has refused to adhere to the court-mandated custody arrangement.

He has now written a book about his experience as a father and a professional athlete and appeared at Google to talk about the book - A Father First: How My Life Became Bigger Than Basketball.

Authors@Google: Dwyane Wade - "A Father First: How My Life Became Bigger Than Basketball" 

A Father First: How My Life Became Bigger Than Basketball

Dwyane Wade, the eight-time All-Star for the Miami Heat, has miraculously defied the odds throughout his career and his life. In 2006, in just his third season in the NBA, Dwyane was named the Finals' MVP, after leading the Miami Heat to the Championship title, basketball's ultimate prize. Two years later, after possible career-ending injuries, he again rose from the ashes of doubt to help win a gold medal for the United States at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. As co-captain, he helped lead the Heat to triumph in the 2012 NBA Championship. Little wonder that legendary coach Pat Riley has called Dwyane "B.I.W."—Best In the World.

As incredible as those achievements have been, it's off the court where Dwyane has sought his most cherished goal: being a good dad to his sons, Zaire and Zion, by playing a meaningful role in their lives. Recounting his fatherhood journey, Dwyane begins his story in March 2011 with the news that after a long, bitter custody battle, he has been awarded sole custody of his sons in a virtually unprecedented court decision. A Father First chronicles the lessons Dwyane has learned as a single dad from the moment of the judge's ruling that instantly changed his life and the lives of his boys, and then back to the events in the past that shaped his dreams, prayers, and promises.

In A Father First, we meet the coaches, mentors, and teammates who played pivotal roles in Dwyane's stunning basketball career—from his early days shooting hoops on the neighborhood courts in Chicago, to his rising stardom at Marquette University in Milwaukee, to his emergence as an unheralded draft pick by the Miami Heat. This book is a revealing, personal story of one of America's top athletes, but it is also a call to action—from a man who had to fight to be in his children's lives—that will show mothers and fathers how to step up and be parents themselves.

Bookforum Omnivore - Back Off, Masculinity Patrol

Last week, Bookforum's Omnivore blog (thematic collections of links posted several times each day) featured a collection of links related to masculinity. There are some really interesting articles in this collection, including one on avoiding feminist men (or not) and one what to do with men who don't want to be men (actually a reply to a NY Times op-ed about men being no longer necessary). Enjoy.

Back off, masculinity patrol

Sep 10 2012  

9:00AM

• Mark Malaby and Benson Green (Ball State): Playing in the Fields of Desire: Hegemonic Masculinity in Live Combat LARPS. 
• Back off, masculinity patrol: Decades after women were allowed to wear pants and play sports, the culture is finally expanding its definition of masculinity. 
• A review of The Second Sexism: Discrimination Against Men and Boys by David Benatar. 
• Are men who don't want to be men really necessary? 
• A review of The Richer Sex: How the New Majority of Female Breadwinners Is Transforming Sex, Love and Family by Liza Mundy. 
• Who wears the pants in this economy? Welcome to the new middle-class matriarchy. 
• Masculinity and mass violence: Elizabeth Drescher on the “intimate enemy” we refuse to name. 
• A review of The End of Men: And the Rise of Women by Hanna Rosin (and more and more and more). 
• A review of Enlisting Masculinity: The Construction of Gender in U.S. Military Recruiting Advertising During the All-Volunteer Force by Melissa Brown. 
• From Ms. Magazine blog, is Ryan Gosling a feminist? 
• Kaylia Payne on why we need to avoid feminist men. 
• (Re)creating multiple masculinities: A look at Hamish Crocket’s ultimate frisbee. 
• Here is a photo history of male affection.

Boy Scouts Covered Up Sex Abuse of Boys

It was bound to be exposed at some point, and now the LA Times is reporting that it has obtained voluminous documents detailing confirmed or alleged child molesters within the U.S. organization that were not only never reported to authorities, but also show efforts to help the molesters hide their crimes.

This situation is no more surprising than the Catholic priests scandal - any place where there young boys there will men who want to molest them. That's not a blanket statement that all Scout Masters are sex offenders, but it acknowledges that offenders go where their victims are easy to be found.


The Scouts currently face 50 pending child sexual abuse cases in 18 states.

Boy Scouts Face Release Of Damaging Child Sex Abuse Files

Reuters  |  Posted: 09/16/2012



By Chris Francescani

Sept 16 (Reuters) - The Boy Scouts of America could face a wave of bad publicity as decades of records of confirmed or alleged child molesters within the U.S. organization are expected to be released in coming weeks.

On Sunday, the Los Angeles Times reported the organization failed to report allegations of sex abuse of scouts by adult leaders and volunteers to police in hundreds of cases from 1970 to 1991. In some cases, the Boy Scouts helped the accused "cover their tracks," the paper said.

The story was based on a review of 1,600 internal Boy Scouts case files the newspaper said it obtained that detailed accusations against confirmed or alleged child molesters within the youth organization.

About 1,200 "ineligible volunteer" files dating from 1965 to 1985 are set to be publicly released under a June order by the Oregon Supreme Court, including some already reviewed by the newspaper.

Those files played a key role in a 2010 civil trial in which an Oregon jury found the Boy Scouts liable in a 1980s pedophile case and ordered the organization to pay nearly $20 million in damages.

The files will be released within three to four weeks, said Paul Mones, one of the attorneys representing the plaintiff in the Oregon case.

In the wake of revelations about systemic child sex abuse within the Catholic Church and the recent Penn State sex abuse scandal, the files threaten to damage the reputation of one of America's most trusted institutions.

Mones said the allegations revealed in the Oregon case are not necessarily comparable to the Catholic Church's sex abuse scandal.

"In the Catholic Church there were overt cover-ups, and I don't think you see a lot of that here with the Boy Scouts," Mones told Reuters on Sunday.

The Boy Scouts of America said in a statement on Sunday that while it regrets past incidents where scouts were sexually abused, its current policies require even suspicions of abuse to be reported directly to law enforcement.

"The BSA (has) continuously enhanced its multi-tiered policies and procedures, which now include background checks, comprehensive training programs and safety policies," the statement said.

The organization said it has maintained an internal "ineligible volunteer" file since at least 1919 to prevent suspected or confirmed child sex abusers from joining or re-entering its ranks.

Boy Scouts of America officials and attorneys have said the files represent only a fraction of the adults who participate as scout leaders each year.

The Boy Scouts have annually counted between 3.5 and 5 million scouts and more than 1 million adult leaders and volunteers among its members since the 1960s, a spokesman for the organization said.

The organization is facing more than 50 pending child sexual abuse cases in 18 states, according to Kelly Clark, another plaintiff attorney in the Oregon case.

Mones said he did not expect many new lawsuits to result from the upcoming release of the Scouts' files, predicting that statutes of limitation on sex abuse charges in most U.S. states would prevent victims from successful civil or criminal prosecution of alleged molesters. (Reporting by Chris Francescani; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Eric Walsh)

Judith Shulevitz - Why Fathers Really Matter

From the New York Times, this is an excellent overview of the some of the most recent data on how big a role fathers play in the lives of their children, from the genetic to the emotional levels. It's good to see this is in a major newspaper.

Why Fathers Really Matter

By JUDITH SHULEVITZ
Published: September 8, 2012

MOTHERHOOD begins as a tempestuously physical experience but quickly becomes a political one. Once a woman’s pregnancy goes public, the storm moves outside. Don’t pile on the pounds! Your child will be obese. Don’t eat too little, or your baby will be born too small. For heaven’s sake, don’t drink alcohol. Oh, please: you can sip some wine now and again. And no matter how many contradictory things the experts say, don’t panic. Stress hormones wreak havoc on a baby’s budding nervous system.

 

All this advice rains down on expectant mothers for the obvious reason that mothers carry babies and create the environments in which they grow. What if it turned out, though, that expectant fathers molded babies, too, and not just by way of genes?

Biology is making it clearer by the day that a man’s health and well-being have a measurable impact on his future children’s health and happiness. This is not because a strong, resilient man has a greater likelihood of being a fabulous dad — or not only for that reason — or because he’s probably got good genes. Whether a man’s genes are good or bad (and whatever “good” and “bad” mean in this context), his children’s bodies and minds will reflect lifestyle choices he has made over the years, even if he made those choices long before he ever imagined himself strapping on a Baby Bjorn. 

Doctors have been telling men for years that smoking, drinking and recreational drugs can lower the quality of their sperm. What doctors should probably add is that the health of unborn children can be affected by what and how much men eat; the toxins they absorb; the traumas they endure; their poverty or powerlessness; and their age at the time of conception. In other words, what a man needs to know is that his life experience leaves biological traces on his children. Even more astonishingly, those children may pass those traces along to their children.

Before I began reading up on fathers and their influence on future generations, I had a high-school-biology-level understanding of how a man passes his traits on to his child. His sperm and the mother’s egg smash into each other, his sperm tosses in one set of chromosomes, the egg tosses in another, and a child’s genetic future is set for life. Physical features: check. Character: check. Cognitive style: check. But the pathways of inheritance, I’ve learned, are subtler and more varied than that. Genes matter, and culture matters, and how fathers behave matters, too.

Lately scientists have become obsessed with a means of inheritance that isn’t genetic but isn’t nongenetic either. It’s epigenetic. “Epi,” in Greek, means “above” or “beyond.” Think of epigenetics as the way our bodies modify their genetic makeup. Epigenetics describes how genes are turned on or off, in part through compounds that hitch on top of DNA — or else jump off it — determining whether it makes the proteins that tell our bodies what to do.

In the past decade or so, the study of epigenetics has become so popular it’s practically a fad. Psychologists and sociologists particularly like it because gene expression or suppression is to some degree dictated by the environment and plays at least as large a role as genes do in the development of a person’s temperament, body shape and predisposition to disease. I’ve become obsessed with epigenetics because it strikes me as both game-changing and terrifying. Our genes can be switched on or off by three environmental factors, among other things: what we ingest (food, drink, air, toxins); what we experience (stress, trauma); and how long we live.

Epigenetics means that our physical and mental tendencies were not set in stone during the Pleistocene age, as evolutionary psychology sometimes seems to claim. Rather, they’re shaped by the life we lead and the world we live in right now. Epigenetics proves that we are the products of history, public as well as private, in parts of us that are so intimately ours that few people ever imagined that history could reach them. (One person who did imagine it is the French 18th-century naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who believed that acquired traits could be inherited. Twentieth-century Darwinian genetics dismissed Lamarckism as laughable, but because of epigenetics, Lamarckism is staging a comeback.)

The best-known example of the power of nutrition to affect the genes of fathers and sons comes from a corner of northern Sweden called Overkalix. Until the 20th century, Overkalix was cut off from the rest of the world, unreachable by road, train or even, in wintertime, boat, because the frozen Baltic Sea could not be crossed. Thus, when there were bad harvests in Overkalix, the children starved, and when there were good harvests, they stuffed themselves.

More than a decade ago, three Swedish researchers dug up records from Overkalix going back to 1799 in order to correlate its children’s health data with records of regional harvests and other documents showing when food was and wasn’t available. What the researchers learned was extremely odd. They found that when boys ate badly during the years right before puberty, between the ages of 9 and 12, their sons, as adults, had lower than normal rates of heart disease. When boys ate all too well during that period, their grandsons had higher rates of diabetes.

When the study appeared in 2002, a British geneticist published an essay speculating that how much a boy ate in prepuberty could permanently reprogram the epigenetic switches that would govern the manufacture of sperm a few years later. And then, in a process so intricate that no one agrees yet how it happens but probably has something to do with the germline (the reproductive cells that are handed down to children, and to children’s children), those reprogrammed switches are transferred to his sons and his sons’ sons.

A decade later, animal studies confirm that a male mammal’s nutritional past has a surprisingly strong effect on his offspring. Male rats that are starved before they’re mated produce offspring with less blood sugar and altered levels of corticosterone (which protects against stress) and insulin-like growth factor 1 (which helps babies develop).

Southeast Asian men who chew betel nuts, a snack that contains a chemical affecting metabolic functioning, are more likely to have children with weight problems and heart disease. Animal studies have shown that the effects of betel nut consumption by a male may extend to his grandchildren.

Environmental toxins leave even more florid traces on grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Vinclozin, a fungicide that used to be sprayed all over America (it’s less common now), is what’s known as an endocrine disrupter; it blocks the production of testosterone. Male rats whose mothers receive a fat dose of vinclozin late in their pregnancy are highly likely to be born with defective testicles and reduced fertility. These problems seem to reappear in up to four generations of male rats after the mother is poisoned.

THAT food and poison change us is not all that surprising, even if it is surprising how far down the change goes. What is unexpected are the psychological dimensions of epigenetics. To learn more about these, I visited the Mount Sinai Medical Center laboratory of Dr. Eric Nestler, a psychiatrist who did a discomfiting study on male mice and what he calls “social defeat.” His researchers put small normal field mice in cages with big, nasty retired breeders, and let the big mice attack the smaller mice for about five minutes a day. If a mean mouse and a little mouse were pried apart by means of a screen, the torturer would claw at the screen, trying to get at his victim. All this subjected the field mouse to “a horrendous level of stress,” Dr. Nestler told me. This process was repeated for 10 days, with a different tormentor placed in each cage every day. By the time the torture stopped, about two-thirds of the field mice exhibited permanent and quantifiable symptoms of the mouse equivalents of depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. The researchers then bred these unhappy mice with normal females. When their pups grew up, they tended to overreact to social stress, becoming so anxious and depressed that they wouldn’t even drink sugar water. They avoided other mice as much as they could. 

Dr. Nestler is not sure exactly how the mouse fathers’ trauma communicates itself to their offspring. It may be via sperm, or it may be through some more complicated dance of nature and nurture that involves sperm but also other factors. When instead of letting the “defeated” mice mate, Dr. Nestler’s researchers killed them, harvested their sperm and impregnated the female mice through artificial means, the offspring were largely normal. Perhaps the sperm was harvested at the wrong stage in the process, says Dr. Nestler. Or maybe the female mouse picked up some signal when she had sex with the dysfunctional male mouse, some telltale pheromone or squeak, that made her body withhold nutrition and care from his pups. Females have been known to not invest in the spawn of non-optimal males, an outcome that makes perfect evolutionary sense — why waste resources on a loser?

When it comes to the epigenetics of aging, however, there is little question that the chemical insults and social setbacks of everyday life distill themselves in sperm. A woman is born with all the eggs she’ll ever carry. By the time a man turns 40, on the other hand, his gonad cells will have divided 610 times to make spermatozoa. By the time he’s in his 50s, that number goes up to 840. Each time those cells copy themselves, mistakes may appear in the DNA chain. Some researchers now think that a percentage of those mistakes reflects not just random mutations but experience-based epigenetic markings that insinuate themselves from sperm to fetus and influence brain development. Another theory holds that aging gonad cells are more error-prone because the parts of the DNA that should have spotted and repaired any mistakes have been epigenetically tamped down. In any case, we now know that the children of older fathers show more signs of schizophrenia, autism and bipolar disorder than children of younger ones.

In a meta-analysis of a population study of more than a million people published last year, Christina Hultman of the Karolinska Institute of Sweden concluded that children of men older than 50 were 2.2 times as likely to have autism as children of 29-year-olds, even after the study had factored out mothers’ ages and known risk factors for autism. By the time the men passed 55, the risk doubled to 4.4 times that of 29-year-olds. Can the aging of the parent population explain the apparent spike in autism cases? A study published last month in Nature that used whole-genome sequencing on 78 Icelandic families made the strongest case to date that as fathers age, mutations in their sperm spike dramatically. Some of the mutations found by the researchers in Reykjavik have been linked to autism and schizophrenia in children.

In his Washington Heights laboratory at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, Jay Gingrich, a professor of psychobiology, compares the pups of young male mice (3 months old or so) to those of old male mice (12 to 14 months old). The differences between the pups, he told me, weren’t “earth-shattering” — they weighed about the same and there weren’t big gaps in their early development. But discrepancies appeared when the mice grew up. The adult offspring of the older fathers had less adventuresome personalities; they also reacted to loud noises in unusual ways that paralleled reactions evinced by schizophrenics who heard similar sounds.

Still, Dr. Gingrich said, “the differences were subtle” until he decided to pool the data on their behavior and graph it on a bell curve. A “vast majority” of the children of the older mice were “completely normal,” he said, which meant their score fell under the upside-down parabola of the curve. The real differences came at the tails or skinny ends of the bell curve. There was about a sixfold increase in likelihood that one of the “abnormal outliers,” mice with cognitive or behavioral handicaps, “would come from an older father.” Conversely, the super-high-performing mice were about six times more likely to come from a younger father. “I’m an inherently skeptical person,” Dr. Gingrich told me, but he was impressed by these results.

One unanswered question about autism and schizophrenia is how they crop up in generation after generation; after all, wildly dysfunctional individuals don’t usually flourish romantically. “I think we’re going to have to consider that advanced paternal age, with its epigenetic effects, may be a way of explaining the mysteries of schizophrenia and autism, insofar as the rates of these disorders have maintained themselves — and autism may be going up,” Dr. Gingrich said. “From a cruel Darwinian perspective, it’s not clear how much success these folks have at procreating, or how else these genes maintain themselves in the population.”

When you’re an older mother, you get used to the sidelong glances of sonogram technicians, the extra battery of medical tests, the fear that your baby has Down syndrome, the real or imagined hints from younger mothers that you’re having children so late because you care more about professional advancement than family. But as the research on paternal inheritance piles up, the needle of doubt may swing at least partway to fathers. “We’re living through a paradigm shift,” said Dolores Malaspina, a professor of psychiatry at New York University who has done pioneering work on older fathers and schizophrenia. Older mothers no longer need to shoulder all the blame: “It’s the aging man who damages the offspring.”

Aging, though, is only one of the vicissitudes of life that assault a man’s reproductive vitality. Think of epigenetics as having ushered in a new age of sexual equality, in which both sexes have to worry about threats to which women once felt uniquely exposed. Dr. Malaspina remembers that before she went to medical school, she worked in a chemical plant making radioactive drugs. The women who worked there came under constant, invasive scrutiny, lest the toxic workplace contaminate their eggs. But maybe, Dr. Malaspina points out, the plant managers should have spared some concern for the men, whose germlines were just as susceptible to poisoning as the women’s, and maybe even more so. The well-being of the children used to be the sole responsibility of their mothers. Now fathers have to be held accountable, too. Having twice endured the self-scrutiny and second-guessing that goes along with being pregnant, I wish them luck. 

Judith Shulevitz is the science editor for The New Republic.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on September 9, 2012, on page SR1 of the New York edition with the headline: Why Fathers Really Matter.

Survey Request - Males' Expectations of Counseling

I found this survey through Boysen Hodgson on Facebook, I am assuming they won't mind the added exposure in generating responses, so if you also have blog that reaches men, please consider re-posting this.

Here is the consent form, the link will take you to the page where you can begin the survey.

Males' Expectations of Counseling

Adult Consent Form

 

Western Michigan University
Department of: Counselor Education Counseling Psychology
Principal Investigator: Lonnie E. Duncan, Ph.D.
Student Investigator: Sheryl Kelly, M.A.

You have been invited to participate in a research project entitled "Males’ Expectations of Counseling." This research is intended to study what men expect to encounter when in a counseling session. This project is Sheryl Kelly’s dissertation project. This consent document will explain the purpose of this research project and will go over all of the time commitments, the procedures used in the study, and the risks and benefits of participating in this research project. Please read this consent form carefully and completely and please ask any questions if you need more clarification.

What are we trying to find out in this study?

Research has consistently shown that men are less likely to seek counseling, harbor negative attitudes toward counseling, and are less willing than women to seek therapy for psychological problems regardless of culture, race, or ethnicity (Addis & Mahalik, 2003; McCarthy & Holliday, 2004; Smith, Tran, & Thompson, 2008). To address this, the present study will expand the current knowledge base on men and their counseling expectations.

Who can participant in this study?
Individuals that identify as a male, being at least 18 years of age, have at least a high school diploma or GED, and have access to the internet will be included in this study. You will be asked to provide general information about yourself, such as age, race, level of education received, education status, socioeconomic status, type of area raised in, and previous counseling experience. If the results of the questionnaires indicate that you are less than 18 years of age, or have less than a high school diploma/GED you will be excluded from the study.  

Where will this study take place?
Participants will be invited to complete a questionnaire, and provided with a link to the secure online website where the survey will be housed.

What is the time commitment for participating in this study?
Each participant will be asked to contribute approximately 45-50 minutes of time to complete the surveys.

What will you be asked to do if you choose to participate in this study?
Participants will be asked to provide informed consent and complete questionnaires. No specific identifying information (e.g., email, phone number, name) will be collected in this process. Questionnaire is to be anonymous.

What information is being measured during the study?
This research will seek to measure and better understand the counseling expectations of males. The information obtained from this study will be interpreted for clinical application and program training.

What are the risks of participating in this study and how will these risks be minimized?
Minimal risk should be present, as the subject will be completing an anonymous online survey. As in all research, there may be unforeseen risks to the participant. No compensation or treatment will be made available to the subject.

What are the benefits of participating in this study?
This research would be beneficial to the field of counseling psychology as well as the population being studied. The data obtained from this study will provide counseling psychologists with insight into the expectations of males, and possibly provide the participants with insight into their thoughts about counseling.

Are there any costs associated with participating in this study?
There are no monetary costs associated with participating cost. Participation in this study will cost each of the participants approximately 45-50 minutes of their time.

Is there any compensation for participating in this study?
No compensation or treatment will be made available to the subject.

Who will have access to the information collected during this study?
Only the student and principal investigator will have access to the information collected. To participate in this anonymous survey, participants will not be required to provide any identifying information such as name or date of birth. Potential participants will complete the anonymous survey on a secure web page that can be accessed via invitation only. Upon gathering all necessary data to conduct study all surveys and subsequently web site will be removed from the internet. Subject identification will be made with a number. Data will be retained for no more than 3 years. Data will remain on a password protected flash drive/personal computer during statistical analysis period Following proper statistical analysis results of data will be presented a part of student investigator’s dissertation defense.

What if you want to stop participating in this study?
You can choose to stop participating in the study at anytime for any reason. You will not suffer any prejudice or penalty by your decision to stop your participation. You will experience NO consequences either academically or personally if you choose to withdraw from this study.

If you have any questions or concerns about this study, you may contact either Sheryl Kelly, M.A. or Lonnie E. Duncan, Ph.D. at 269-387-5152. You may also contact the chair of Human Subjects Institutional Review Board at 269-387-8293 or the vice president for research at 269-387-8298 with any concerns that you have.

This consent has been approved by the Western Michigan University Human Subjects Institutional Review Board (HSIRB) on July 31, 2012. Do not participate after July 31, 2013.

Go to the survey.

74-Year-Old Japanese Bodybuilder Is Ripped

This cool video was posted at the IEET site. It's pretty damn inspiring to see someone his age in such amazing shape.

74-year-old Bodybuilder: Japan’s Slickest Septuagenarian

Tsutoma Tosaka
Posted by Dr. Nona
Posted: Sep 12, 2012

He’s been pumping iron for 50 years - now Tosaka’s competing in a competition at the age of 74.

Maria Bustillos - Men Aren’t Ending - A Response to Hanna Rosin

As I have mentioned here a couple of times, Hanna Rosin has a new book out based on her 2010 article in the The Atlantic, The End of Men. Reviving the title of her article, the new book is The End of Men: And the Rise of Women.

In the September 11, 2012 issue of the LA Review of Books, Maria Bustillos offers a rebuttal to Rosin.

Men aren’t ending

Hanna Rosin's loosely organized new book makes serious omissions in its presentation of research

By Maria Bustillos, LA Review of Books

This article originally appeared on the L.A. Review of Books.

AFTER CENTURIES OF OPPRESSION, women have won the day at last and “pulled decisively ahead [of men] by almost every measure.” This is the key argument made by Hanna Rosin in a new book, The End of Men and the Rise of Women. Mainly, it turns out, she means that there are more women enrolling in and graduating from college now than there are men, and that their ranks in the business world, in the professions, and in politics are swelling: natural enough developments in an increasingly egalitarian society that has seen its male-dominated manufacturing sector decimated in recent decades. The big question for this reader is why — at the very moment when we almost have people respecting one another as equals — we would be talking about “The End” of anybody. I don’t want anybody to end; I don’t buy for an instant that Men are Ending, and I can’t bring myself to believe that much of anyone else will, either.

Rosin makes her case in a series of chapters loosely organized around the idea that economic power has irrevocably altered the various roles of women in U.S. culture. In “Hearts of Steel: Single Girls Master the Hook-Up,” she praises the freedom that young women have gained as a benefit of what she calls the “hook-up culture” of modern university life, making a contrast with her own college days in the late 1980s. Her claim is that this new sexual freedom makes it possible for women to pursue their careers more effectively, with less distraction. “The most patient and thorough research about the hook-up culture shows that over the long run, women benefit greatly from living in a world where they can have sexual adventure without commitment or all that much shame, and where they can enter into temporary relationships that don’t derail their careers.”

This description has fit U.S. sexual mores for women for over 50 years. From the moment contraception became widely available to American women, they have been able to enjoy sexual freedom “without commitment or all that much shame” and to avoid marriage if they choose. The salient point, then and now, is not so much “without commitment” as “without fear of conception.” Women still face the same basic questions: career vs. family; commitment vs. fancy-freedom; finding a mate who will support our ambitions, and whose ambitions we, in turn, can support. Many of us who came of age during the time of great sexual permissiveness before the advent of AIDS find the current generation much like our own, or if anything a little bit more careful: a mixed bag, with some very “adventurous” people and some far less so. There’s nothing new, in other words, about “hook-up culture.”

Serious omissions have been made in presenting some of the research in The End of Men. For example, Rosin cites an article in the New York Times (‘For Women Under 30, Most Births Occur Outside Marriage‘) as evidence that women don’t need men as much as they used to. They’re having babies “outside marriage.” But the article in question says that “[a]lmost all of the rise in nonmarital births has occurred among couples living together.” This would suggest that it’s the institution of marriage, not the presence of men, that has declined.

Rosin goes on to quote UVA sociologist Brad Wilcox: “The family changes over the past four decades have been bad for men and bad for kids, but it’s not clear they are bad for women.” So, is it fair to say that Wilxox thinks “the erosion of marriage” is a positive thing for women?

Not so fast. Just a few weeks ago, an essay appeared in Slate citing a battery of recent studies and concluding unequivocally that “it’s worse to be raised by a single mother, even if you’re not poor.” The author? UVA sociologist Brad Wilcox:

Children from poor and working-class homes are now doubly disadvantaged by their parents’ economic meager resources and by the fact that their parents often break up. By contrast, children from more-educated and affluent homes are doubly advantaged by their parents’ substantial economic resources and by the fact that their parents usually get and stay married.

How, exactly, can changes in society that harm children possibly benefit their mothers?

In the book’s most bewildering chapter, “A More Perfect Poison: The New Wave of Female Violence,” Rosin says that women are becoming more aggressive and powerful not just in the courts of Venus, but on the field of Mars. It opens with the story of a California woman who killed her husband by drugging him and stuffing him into a vat of acid, followed by several accounts of women who poisoned their husbands, and who are “remaking the lady poisoner archetype to fit with the upheaval in our modern domestic arrangements.” Such a poisoner might be a chemist, for example, with “an impressive job at a biochemical or pharmaceutical company.” That means she wouldn’t be availing herself of “household staples accessible to the average unhappy housewife” in order to kill anybody. Exactly what of any value might be learned about gender politics from such monstrosities isn’t really made clear.

But female aggression in general is on the rise, according to Rosin. “Since the United States passed mandatory arrest laws for domestic violence in the late 1990s, arrest rates for women have skyrocketed, and in some states reached 50 percent or more of all arrests.” We used to think that women weren’t competitive or dominant, but “they are breaking through even that last barrier, with the force of the Lady Gagas, Katniss Everdeens, and schoolgirls with cleats and bruises.” I honestly can’t tell whether or not Rosin sees this as a good thing, but again: we have had brawling women as well as brawling men since the days of Boadicea, if not earlier. Maybe the desperation among women has gotten worse in tandem with their rising responsibilities in the working world. If it has, that’s clearly a bug, not a feature.

There are some bright spots in the book, notably the investigation into how women are adapting to a changing world not only as students and in business, but as mothers. Describing a group of female undergraduates, Rosin writes: “[...] basic expectations for men and women [have] shifted. Many of the women’s mothers [...] established careers later in life, sometimes after a divorce, and they had urged their daughters to move more quickly to establish their own careers.” This seems both true, and interesting: it seems likely that modern parents, themselves raised in vastly different circumstances, have been forced to improvise a different kind of preparation for their own children in order to give them a better shot at happiness. I’d love to see more written about how parenthood is changing in response to twenty-first century pressures.

There’s some unintentional humor, too. Rosin describes Auburn-Opelika, a town in Alabama, as a “feminist paradise” where women dominate in a “feminized economy: a combination of university, service, and government jobs, with a small share in manufacturing.” In this “modern-day Herland,” the local Chevy dealership “tried to tempt people to a weekend sale with the promise of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies,” Rosin says, adding, “What man would fall for that?” Of the many whoppers in this book, I believe this one staggered me the most. How is it that Hanna Rosin is married to a man, has two sons, and can ask this amazing question?

Every single man I know would fall for that. No seriously, I have sat here and tried for the last 10 minutes, and I can’t think of one single man who wouldn’t high-tail it to a car dealership (or basically anywhere) that was handing out chocolate chip cookies.

¤

By far the biggest problem with The End of Men is its gender essentialism. The title isn’t a bit misleading; this is manifestly a misandrist book. The men depicted are an incredibly sorry lot, it’s true. Rosin shows one of them how to manage the complexities of the microwave at 7-Eleven. Another, a lazy stay-at-home dad, is unperturbed when his toddler son pees on the floor and smears poop on the walls; when his high-achieving lawyer wife gets home, she cleans everything and everybody up and cooks dinner like a “whirlwind” as her no-count man sits on a stool to “watch her work”.

These guys have been fired, laid off from manufacturing jobs, they’ve become OxyContin addicts, they’re violent, they don’t pay child support. They go fishing all day and drip fishy water onto the floor.

“They don’t like to think too hard,” offers one woman, as an explanation of why men don’t want to go to college. And when they do, “guys high-five one another when they get a C, while girls beat themselves up over a B-minus.” Another, of her boyfriend: “He has no opinion at all. He wants me to tell him what to do.” Men! They spend hours playing video games! They can’t sit still! They are “the new ball and chain.”

This kind of thing makes Rosin come off like a mirror version of David Brooks, drawing improbable conclusions from pretend or crazily narrow, twisted bits of evidence or the most threadbare, throwback caricatures. “For most of the [twentieth] century men derived their sense of manliness from their work, or their role as head of the family,” we learn. “A ‘coalminer’ or a ‘rigger’ used to be a complete identity, connecting a man to a long lineage of men. Implicit in the title was his role as anchor of a domestic existence [...] They lost the old architecture of manliness, but they have not replaced it with any obvious new one.” In fact no, the architecture of manliness is exactly as it has ever been, the lineage unbroken. Unzip the fly of the nearest man (ask first, I guess) and you will find that nothing whatsoever has changed in this regard. How many “riggers” did Rosin interview for this book?

Equality is the pole star of my own politics, and that made it really tough going for me to read The End of Men objectively, or maybe even fairly, because it’s evident that Rosin believes women to be literally — and inherently — superior to men. This view is not only one I don’t share, it is anathema to me. It is the exact reason why I have never been able to call myself a feminist; it transgresses against my deepest conviction, namely, a belief in universal human equality. I believe that each of us — all human beings who share the same seemingly limitless abilities, and the same unfathomable doom — should be able to develop his or her potential and live freely and on equal terms in a condition of mutual respect and support. That is not quite the Rosin view. “It’s possible that girls have always had the raw material to make better students,” she writes, “that they’ve always been more studious, organized, self-disciplined, and eager to please, but, because of limited opportunities, what did it matter?” Or: “Many of us hold out the hope that there is a utopia in our future run by women, that power does not in fact corrupt equally.” (Really, “many” of us hold out this hope? I for one would be too scared it would turn out like that old Star Trek: TNG episode, “Angel One.”)

“When it comes to the knowledge, drive, and discipline necessary to succeed, women are the naturals with whom men have to strain to keep up.” Surely, generalizations like these are unhelpful at best. Demographic groups don’t compete, don’t study, don’t seek out the good life: individuals do. That is not even getting into the fact that by “success,” Rosin mainly means a better degree, a bigger salary, material comfort. Perhaps that kind of thinking produces more unhappiness even than the gender wars ever did. In any case, reading remarks like these is liable to prove painful to any reader of very profound egalitarian convictions; it’s like having the root that binds you to the universe hacked at with some kind of machete of Amazonian cluelessness.

In Rosin’s world, girls and women adapt, learn, and better their chances, but boys and men somehow don’t. If violence against women has greatly diminished, if “rape [has] declined sharply over the last thirty-five years,” Rosin seems to think that this is because women have changed, not because men have. Women have grown feistier, they have more power, ergo they are harder to victimize: they have learned they can “say no.” Surely, though, another possible reason for the decline in violence against women might be that men are learning, too: that the basic ideas of fairness and equality that have been promulgated in schools and media since the 1970s — of gender equality, race equality, respect for others — are working for men, as well as for women. The possibility that we’re doing a better job of teaching men not to harm women doesn’t even get a look in.

Beyond this, it appears, we have arrived at the crux of the matter. How on earth can things be “better” only for women, but not for men, or for children? Surely things can only be considered “better” if they are better for everyone: the meanest intelligence in the world would scorn an “improvement” that left her own mate, or her own children, behind. How can we talk about “having it all” as if success were something to be achieved only by individuals, each in the vacuum of her own ambition, and not in families or communities, or marriages?

While we are on the subject of “having it all”: though I admired Anne-Marie Slaughter’s celebrated Atlantic essay, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” I was appalled to see Touré’s equally valuable response in Time go almost completely ignored. “Men are more likely than women to choose work at a cost to family,” he wrote. “Perhaps they suffer less emotionally over that [though, wait — why would anyone think so?], but there’s still pain there. We just push the feelings down and don’t complain. That’s why our side of this story rarely gets told.”

Progress is not a zero-sum game. Society gains when the injustices against men are addressed equally with the injustices against women. Surely it would be wrong to hold one kind of progress hostage to the other. I hope we haven’t forgotten how many young black men are in jail, or how many gay men are discriminated against, or how many poor men are denied a decent education. If we concentrate on the problems that all kinds of people are having, rather than dividing everyone up into the equivalent of rival football teams, won’t we have a better chance of setting things to rights?

While I’m at it, how come everyone has his knickers in such a twist about how we women make less money, but nobody seems to care that the men still die younger than we do? Isn’t that at least equally urgent a problem? I’ve often thought that the shorter lifespan American men have traditionally enjoyed must have been owing to their having to go out to do battle in the wider world alone, to take risks that go unshared by their wives and children; theirs is a solitary, thankless struggle with a heart attack waiting at the end of it. If a man who operated as the head of a “traditional” family were to be fired, or get sick, lose his job, who was going to pick up the slack? It was all on him. Having grown up in such a household, and then establishing the kind where there are two of us out there contending on behalf of our family, it seems so clear that the latter way is fairer and saner for men, and for women too.

It’s tempting to cite last year’s NIH study showing that the life expectancy gender gap is narrowing as evidence of this. As women increasingly share the burden of bringing home the bacon for their families, the gap might eventually disappear altogether.

In short, why aren’t we asking that our society come to “have it all” together? Isn’t that the only way it would work? Is what we’re looking at simply a calcified failure of empathy and of imagination — the sad legacy of the Me Generation, which held that “self-realization” was the goal of life? How can we realize ourselves alone? How can we realize ourselves without one another?

¤

Rosin’s son, Jacob, gets a shout-out in the acknowledgements of The End of Men: “[He] asks me every day why I would write a book with such a mean title. I always tell him that I want to convince people that some men out there need our help, since it’s not always so easy for them to ask for it. He doesn’t quite believe me yet, but maybe one day he will.”

Count me on Jacob’s side of the question. How, exactly, does a book like Rosin’s convince us that “some men out there need our help”? It sounds a lot more like R.I.P. to me: an interpretation amply borne out by the book’s contents.

The dedication of the book reads, “To Jacob, with apologies for the title.” At least Rosin found grace enough to apologize to Jacob. The rest of us are still waiting.

Documentary - N.W.A. The World’s Most Dangerous Group

In the late 1980s, NWA turned the rap world upside down by singing and rapping about real, everyday life in the inner city of Compton, ground zero for drugs, gangs, and guns in Los Angeles. Their music documented the rage and despair that led, eventually, to the L.A. riots in the aftermath of the Rodney King beating.

In 1989, the FBI went after them on the pretext that their music incited violence against police. Such actions seriously backfired - the more negative press they received, the more records they sold. Even after Ice Cube left, their second full-length album went to #1 on the Billboard charts - the first hardcore rap album to do so.

Their music captured a moment in time for young black men growing up in the inner cities - maybe things have changed since then, but I doubt it.

This documentary tells the story of their rise to fame - and it's narrated by Chris Rock (VH1, 2008).


N.W.A. The World’s Most Dangerous Group

NWA: The World’s Most Dangerous Group tells the story of a group of childhood friends from Compton who channeled the rage of the streets through the prism of rap music and pop culture. Eazy-E, Dr. Dre, Ice-Cube, MC Ren and DJ Yella gave a powerful voice to the late-80′s Compton ghetto that was on the verge of exploding, and in the process scared the hell out of White America. We also show you new interviews with Ice Cube, DJ Yella, Eazy-E’s widow Tamika Wright, former manager Jerry Heller, Ice-T, and director John Singleton. Supplemented by rarely-seen footage and interviews of the group’s early days, photos, and music, the documentary will show how gangsta rap was born in late 80s Los Angeles, a city torn by drugs and violence…and how a nation grew to fear the music that emerged.