If you are overweight or obese, weight loss and, perhaps especially, exercise may help boost your levels without medication. Can I do anything to elevate my testosterone naturally? Stop therapy, and fertility likely will return. "Per the guidelines, low testosterone is less than 300 ng/dL," says Dubin. Infertility, osteoporosis, and breast growth or breast tenderness can also trigger an evaluation for testosterone deficiency. "When we have a man come into our office and tell us that, say, two years ago they used to be very interested in sex and there’s been a sharp decline, that’s a clue that they may have a decline in testosterone." "Low libido is the most sensitive symptom for detecting low testosterone," says Dubin. You need to have both to land you a diagnosis of hypogonadism (which is sometimes called low testosterone, testosterone deficiency, or androgen deficiency). When testosterone reaches supra-therapeutic levels, aggressive behavior and increased rates of suicide among adolescent users have been reported; however, no study has documented a negative impact on cognition in men patients receiving TRT. Because of this risk of polycythemia, men undergoing TRT should not only have their complete blood count (CBC) monitored during their therapy, but should also have a baseline CBC drawn before testosterone therapy is initiated. For premalignancy, prostatic intraepithelial neoplasia (PIN) appears to be a risk factor for developing prostate cancer, however this association has been mostly demonstrated for high-grade disease.26,27 There is a lack of long-term data on the use of TRT in men with PIN. While older men on testosterone therapy do have an increase in overall prostate size, this increase in size does not differ from the increase in prostatic hypertrophy seen in elderly men not on testosterone therapy. But there aren't controlled studies for those using it with normal testosterone levels. Multiple blood tests can measure testosterone levels. The FDA only approves the use of testosterone for people who have symptoms and are hypogonadal, meaning they have a condition that causes lower-than-normal testosterone levels, LaPook said. Only four men were found to develop prostate cancer over 5 years of observation, which is not greater than the incidence in the general population. This corresponds to an incidence of 30.3 cases of prostate cancer per 10,000 person-years (CI 0.9738–9.4052). A cumulative registry study aimed at investigating TRT effects on the metabolic syndrome followed 255 men with subnormal T levels treated with T undecanoate (TU) for a total of 60 months Traish et al. 2013. "But many of these companies prescribe testosterone to men with above-average levels and mislead customers by telling them that their normal T levels are low." "There’s been a proliferation of online companies and for-profit men’s health clinics," says Irwig, who has written about the off-label use of testosterone. Most studies don’t provide enough detail to know exactly when testosterone measurements were taken or how testosterone was measured. If you measure later in the day at the beginning of the study and earlier in the day at the end of the study, odds are high that you’ll show a "boost" in testosterone. Good luck finding a supplement study that measured testosterone more than once at the beginning and once at the end of the study. That’s why athletes use it." But there are risks to taking testosterone, either as replacement therapy or as a drug. "So if you’re really frail, testosterone therapy isn’t going to do much. "But in the guys that were frailest and couldn’t walk very far, testosterone therapy didn’t improve how far they walked," says Anawalt. About 20 percent of the testosterone takers—versus only 13 percent of the placebo takers—increased their 6-minute walk distance by at least 164 feet (50 meters). "Giving these guys testosterone increased their sex drive and sexual desire. So the results don’t apply to men with normal testosterone levels.