The synthetic sex hormone Danazol extends...
GreenPower 23 May 2016
Interesting article in The New England Journal of Medicine. Extracts below. The entire article can be downloaded "for personal use only".
Methods
In a phase 1–2 prospective study involving patients with telomere diseases, we administered the synthetic sex hormone danazol orally at a dose of 800 mg per day for a total of 24 months.
Results
After 27 patients were enrolled, the study was halted early, because telomere attrition was reduced in all 12 patients who could be evaluated for the primary end point; in the intention-to-treat analysis, 12 of 27 patients (44%; 95% confidence interval [CI], 26 to 64) met the primary efficacy end point. Unexpectedly, almost all the patients (11 of 12, 92%) had a gain in telomere length at 24 months as compared with baseline (mean increase, 386 bp [95% CI, 178 to 593])
Conclusions
In our study, treatment with danazol led to telomere elongation in patients with telomere diseases. (Funded by the National Institutes of Health; ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT01441037.)
basileuz 03 Jul 2016
This looks promising.
It does potentially mean there is a widely available oral drug which can lengthen telomeres.
A study checking the effect of this on rats' lifespan would be interesting, but I don't think it's likely someone would sponsor it. This is an old drug and its patent will expire any day now.
Rocket 07 Jul 2016
This looks promising.
It does potentially mean there is a widely available oral drug which can lengthen telomeres.
A study checking the effect of this on rats' lifespan would be interesting, but I don't think it's likely someone would sponsor it. This is an old drug and its patent will expire any day now.
There is nothing magical about Danazol. All androgenic anabolic steroids increase telomere length!
nowayout 07 Jul 2016
This looks promising.
It does potentially mean there is a widely available oral drug which can lengthen telomeres.
A study checking the effect of this on rats' lifespan would be interesting, but I don't think it's likely someone would sponsor it. This is an old drug and its patent will expire any day now.
There is nothing magical about Danazol. All androgenic anabolic steroids increase telomere length!
Do they? I haven't seen any research claiming this. Danazol also bind to progesterone receptors and has other non-androgenic effects so it would be good to elucidate the mechanism of action here.
Certainly danazol would be a very dirty candidate for studying specifically androgens' effect on telomeres. For that something like DHT would be much a much cleaner candidate, so I am curious why they chose this drug.
Danazol is really a very weak androgen (testosterone itself is 200 times more androgenic) so men would have to take an awfully high dose of danazol to make any "androgenic" difference against the background of our natural testosterone.
Edited by nowayout, 07 July 2016 - 02:36 PM.
playground 29 Jul 2016
Where is the evidence that Testosterone and DHT lengthen telomeres ?
Thanks to anyone that replies to this question :-)
What we need... Is a comparison chart showing how much telomere lengthening
is achieved with different steroids... and this would include Testosterone and DHT
(and perhaps estrogen and progesterone too)
basileuz 29 Jul 2016
There is no evidence whatsoever that androgenic steroids increase telomere length. I've seen one article even claiming the contrary, that testosterone decreases telomere length.
Danazol has almost no androgenic activity, its main effect being desensitization of your HPTA axis, even reducing your natural production of testosterone. One could say that danazol does the opposite of HCG. Danazol can very easily be obtained where I live, without a prescription. If it had any androgenic value, there'd be people abusing it. People use clomiphene, tamoxifen and HCG for steroid abuse purposes but I've never heard of anyone using danazol, which seems to have a negative effect if anything.
This effect (or the contrary, for that matter) is unlikely to be relevant with usage of common steroids (like testosterone and winstrol). We have enough bodybuilders using these drugs that if they really made that much of a difference, we'd have lots of 120-year-old bodybuilders with an unnaturally young appearance.
Another concern is with the study about danazol extending telomeres itself. It has severe methodological flaws. Though its findings surely warrant investigation, please do not take its finds as fact just yet.
Where is the evidence that Testosterone and DHT lengthen telomeres ?
Thanks to anyone that replies to this question :-)
What we need... Is a comparison chart showing how much telomere lengthening
is achieved with different steroids... and this would include Testosterone and DHT
(and perhaps estrogen and progesterone too)
This looks promising.
It does potentially mean there is a widely available oral drug which can lengthen telomeres.
A study checking the effect of this on rats' lifespan would be interesting, but I don't think it's likely someone would sponsor it. This is an old drug and its patent will expire any day now.
There is nothing magical about Danazol. All androgenic anabolic steroids increase telomere length!
Do they? I haven't seen any research claiming this. Danazol also bind to progesterone receptors and has other non-androgenic effects so it would be good to elucidate the mechanism of action here.
Certainly danazol would be a very dirty candidate for studying specifically androgens' effect on telomeres. For that something like DHT would be much a much cleaner candidate, so I am curious why they chose this drug.
Danazol is really a very weak androgen (testosterone itself is 200 times more androgenic) so men would have to take an awfully high dose of danazol to make any "androgenic" difference against the background of our natural testosterone.
Rocket 09 Aug 2016
There is evidence beyond 1 article. This is just one study being done on the androgenic steroid called nandrolone.... Just an example. Guys gotta do more digging before saying there is only 1 study out there. And no I'm not saying case closed and steroids regrow telomeres.
Edited by Rocket, 09 August 2016 - 02:53 AM.
Doctorwill 13 Aug 2016
That's like me thinking I have found a gold mine just because I'm planning to look in my back yard!
In the original study they used a dose of 800 mg on a very ill group. I hope there is a follow up at different dosages on healthy people.
Or look at the impact on longevity of the people who have taken the drug for years for other purposes like with some of the early metformin research.
nowayout 25 Aug 2016
What I don't get about this study is why Danazol of all things? What motivated them to try this drug for these conditions? It is pretty much one of the worst models for studying the effect of "androgens" one could think of, so there must have been some other motivation.
Edited by nowayout, 25 August 2016 - 02:58 PM.
playground 25 Aug 2016
What I don't get about this study is why Danazol of all things? What motivated them to try this drug for these conditions? It is pretty much one of the worst models for studying the effect of "androgens" one could think of, so there must have been some other motivation.
I agree. It looks so suspicious.
Of all the compounds you might choose to test for telomere activitiy... why Danazol ?
Can you imagine better marketing than research results like these ?
It wouldn't surprise me to find out that the patent has just been sold.
Or that someone has 100,000 boxes of this stuff in a warehouse somewhere.
Give it time and we might only hear negative replication results after this.
Certainly, don't go out and buy a truck load of this stuff.
Rocket 29 Aug 2016
There is a study of nandrolone taking place in a developing country. They have not even gathered data yet.
That's like me thinking I have found a gold mine just because I'm planning to look in my back yard!
In the original study they used a dose of 800 mg on a very ill group. I hope there is a follow up at different dosages on healthy people.
Or look at the impact on longevity of the people who have taken the drug for years for other purposes like with some of the early metformin research.
As I said, NOT.... repeat.... NOT case closed. But rather people are beginning to look in this direction. All I said is there is more than 1 study, and there are other researchers who suspect androgens positively effect telomeres.
Also....
I thought it was common knowledge that you don't go onto anabolic steroids indefinitely. Never, ever, ever, should someone go on steroids indefinitely. That's why bodybuilders do what is called cycling. 12-14 weeks on, then many months off while the body recuperates. Not to mention getting blood tests at least every 8 weeks to see what is up with RBC.... RBC rises significantly on large doses of testosterone and rises significantly on even small doses of other more powerful substances. That's why some BBers donate blood routinely to lower RBC.
The longevity of people who cycle steroids SMARTLY is no different than people who don't. The media is replete with story after story of dead bodybuilders, but when you look into it, these are the guys who lived on roids 24/7 without breaks. They probably never got blood work done to see what was happening to lipids either.
Some people also are just not cut out for steroids. My skinny coworker has a total cholesterol of something like 220 and is practically a vegetarian. Mine hovers around 160 total and I eat 200 grams of protein daily in the form of meat, eggs, and whey. People with bad cholesterol to begin with should avoid roids unless it's a low dose for TRT.
I have successfully used certain chemicals to heal a injury that my sports medicine doctor said never heals and the best my only option was periodic cortisone injections and to give up lifting. They're not all bad, esp when used correctly.
Edited by Rocket, 29 August 2016 - 05:51 PM.
playground 31 Aug 2016
This is all premised on the idea that cholesterol is bad for you.
That's just nonsense.
This is supposed to be a thread about a steroid's effect on telomerase.
Can you not focus on that rather than recycling this bullshit about cholesterol ?
YOLF 16 Sep 2016
There is a study of nandrolone taking place in a developing country. They have not even gathered data yet.
That's like me thinking I have found a gold mine just because I'm planning to look in my back yard!
In the original study they used a dose of 800 mg on a very ill group. I hope there is a follow up at different dosages on healthy people.
Or look at the impact on longevity of the people who have taken the drug for years for other purposes like with some of the early metformin research.
Would healthy people want to take this stuff? It's definitely not w/o undesireable side effects. I wouldn't expect there to be many healthy test subjects out there.
Nowayout quote:
What I don't get about this study is why Danazol of all things? What motivated them to try this drug for these conditions? It is pretty much one of the worst models for studying the effect of "androgens" one could think of, so there must have been some other motivation.
It's got it's uses in women with certain disorders.
Edited by YOLF, 16 September 2016 - 06:29 AM.
apmark 26 Jan 2017
This was an interesting thread . A pity it seems to have died possibly due to the cost I think