chronic stress

DHEA May Be Effective Treatment for Female Sexual Dysfunction

In using salivary analysis to check for hormone levels (saliva checks for the free forms of hormones, not the ineffective protein bound forms that most bloodwork checks for…) as an assay for adrenal gland function, cortisol and DHEA levels are checked. In patients under chronic stress, the body will actually steal the building blocks to make more cortisol, leaving none to make DHEA. Now, considering that DHEA is the precursor to testosterone and estrogen, this creates a problem. This article shows benefits of using DHEA in women with sexual dysfunction. Personally, I would check adrenal function first. By addressing this problem, DHEA levels can rise without ever administering DHEA itself.

96th annual meeting of the American Urological Association Dehydroepiandosterone (DHEA) may serve as an effective treatment for women with androgen deficiency syndrome leading to sexual dysfunction, according to a study released at the 96th annual meeting of the American Urological Association in Anaheim, California.Irwin Goldstein, MD, and colleagues from Boston University School of Medicine administered DHEA to 32 patients. After 6-12 months of receiving 50 mg of DHEA daily, all of the women reported improved scores both on the Female Sexual Function Index and the Sexual Distress Scale.Use of the adrenal androgen steroid as therapy for sexual dysfunction remains controversial, however, because there is a lack of specific criteria for diagnosis of female androgen deficiency syndrome.Until now, women with sexual dysfunction and a serum-free testosterone concentration in the lower third of the normal range have been considered for androgen replacement therapy. The syndrome is associated with loss of libido, low motivation, and fatigue, most often occurring in women who have undergone oophorectomy or are postmenopausal. A lack of objective measures for gauging symptoms such as blunted motivation, however, as well as low assay sensitivity in the lower concentrations of androgen seen in women after iatrogenic menopause have hampered clinicians’s abilities to reach consensus on the definition and classification of the syndrome.