Re:Review of Anti-Aging Drugs
by joemazerino on Monday August 18, 2025 @12:12AM
(#44937341)
Estradiol should not be supplemented for men.
Re:Review of Anti-Aging Drugs
by nerdsniper on Monday August 18, 2025 @07:55AM
(#44939640)
Helps this masculine man. Low E2 is one of the most awful experiences.
Estradiol isn’t very well studied. It may be used for a few years in menopause, only in rare cases off-label, otherwise. Scientific and commercial interest seems pretty non existent. Probably because patentable synthetic derivatives historically fared worse risk-wise, than bioidentical estrogens, and the market outside of menopause issues is too small. Research on trans people, who would make interesting study subjects for hormonal matters, just got outlawed in the US.
Hormonal contraceptives typically do not contain estradiol, but ethinylestradiol and/or progestins.
I was going to note that a relatively large sample group has been taking estradiol en masse for many years, but you rightly called out that studying trans folks is now forbidden in the US. A shame, we could have offered up quite a bit of knowledge on it.
Estradiol is _extremely_ well studied, including non-HRT in AFAB/AMAB cisgender eugonadal populations
Birth control uses Ethinyl Estradiol which, despite the name, is not actually Estradiol and so does not undergo the same metabolic pathways and metabolites production
I know this because I recently had to source exogenous Estradiol for my wife after making this same mistaken assumption and being surprised at bloodwork and lack of improvement
It is also likely the most easy to study, as we have 60-70 years of usage that is not correlated with prevalence of other diseases that might skew life expectancy (like metformin etc.), and quite high-quality medical records by virtue of it being vended on a prescription basis.
Despite this, there is not really any clear evidence that it increases life expectancy.