Hypogonadism, Diabetes: Chronic Diseases That Need to be Treated For Life

Farid Saad, DVM, PhD, Bayer Pharma AG highlighted some difficulty his team had run into with German reimbursement systems regarding a different registry. The health insurance agency decided that the treatment wasn’t really necessary, so patients were taken off testosterone therapy for 1.5 years. The team immediately saw that all the parameters they previously measured had worsened. So, it was very clear the results they had seen were results of testosterone treatment.

However, the new registry continuously administered testosterone treatment to the patients with type 1 diabetes. Among the improvements in glycemic control, the team saw massive improvements in their weight loss, since testosterone increases lean body mass.

When asked on what other patient groups Saad and team would test long-term testosterone therapy, he said the most prominent patient group among the hypogonadal men are always the type 2 diabetes men. “We’ve seen in this registry and the parallel registry that about 35% of all hypogonadal men presenting with all kinds of problems had type 2 diabetes.” Saad said they also frequently found rates of pre-diabetes. With pre-diabetes, not a single patient who receives testosterone progresses to diabetes. However, Saad saw the testosterone was 100% able to prevent the progression from pre-diabetes to diabetes. “That is a very striking finding,” said Saad.

Saad told MD Magazine that his team plans to analyze mortality data. Saad said they introduced a control group of men who were found to be hypogonadal, but for some reason did not want to go on testosterone, since they were fearful of what it could cause.