3 types of T Levels

The 3 Types of T Levels: Most doctors measure something called “total testosterone,” which is a measurement of the total amount of T flowing through your veins. The numbers might range anywhere from 300 to 1100 nanograms per deciliter of blood. Trouble is, it tells you almost nothing about your hormonal status. For one thing, blood values vary by the minute.
.
The only way to get a reasonably accurate reading would be to collect urine over a 24-hour period and have the lab use it to measure test and its metabolites. Alternately, you could donate at least 3 blood samples from different times of the day. The lab would then pool the samples together and test that sample. But those ways are more expensive, time consuming, and inconvenient. And even if you did pool multiple blood samples, it still wouldn’t tell you much. For one thing, even though the results might indicate that you have a “normal” level of T, it might not be normal for you.
.
Or maybe you had a reading of 1,000 in your twenties, but now you’re getting by on a comparatively low level of 400. While 400 is considered normal, it might not be an optimum level for you. The only way you’d know what was normal for you is if you’d established a baseline reading before you turned 30, but hardly anybody does that.
.
Then there’s the issue of sex hormone binding globulin, or SHBG. It’s a glycoprotein and it literally binds up the sex hormones, including, on average, about 60% of your test, and that percentage keeps climbing as you grow older. The more SHBG you have, the more of your test is bound up. So while your T level may be as high as 600, a good portion of it could be locked up. That’s why, when trying to determine your T levels, doctors should ask the lab for your:
.
• Total T
• Free T
• Bioavailable T
.
That way you can get a little bit better of an idea of what your testosterone situation is. Determining normal T levels is tricky, so regardless of what your lab values are, and given the problematical nature of the lab tests, you have to instead rely on symptoms and the simple desire to be more than you are, hormonally speaking.
.
Do YOU get your T tested?