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Men, did you know being a good father can lower your testosterone levels? What a bummer.  Just as we get to enjoy our partners pitching in to help with the kids, now they have a reason to stop. All kidding aside, however, a new University of Michigan study found that when men saw their infants in distress, it lowered their testosterone. Yes, when men are nurturing and caring for their children, their "maleness" declines.  While that might not make fathers very happy, I suspect it has to do with the law of the jungle, with male beasts preferring to shelter and protect their young rather than get bloody and torn up in fights with the others in the clan.  (Of course, this doesn't account for the fathers who eat their young.  But that's a story for another day.) But now it looks like men may be decompensated for being a good father. A crying infant can trigger certain emotions that may be accompanied by a corresponding hormonal response: empathy with decreas...

Men blame them for their partners' moods and misanthropy, women for their weight gains and woe. We're talking, of course, about hormones. Now a new study says they're also responsible for cheating.  According to newswise.com, hormones influence unethical behavior. The study found that the endocrine system plays a dual role in unethical acts. First, elevated hormone levels predict likelihood of cheating. Then, a change of hormone levels during the act reinforces the behavior. “Although the science of hormones and behavior dates back to the early 19th century, only recently has research revealed just how powerful and pervasive the influence of the endocrine system is on human behavior,” says author and University of Texas Austin professor of psychology, Robert Josephs.  Researchers asked 117 participants to complete a math test, grade it themselves and self-report the number of correctly completed problems. The more problems they got correct, the more m...

OK.  It's what a lot of men want, and some pretend to have.  We're talking higher levels of testosterone .  But now a new study is finding that obese men with this have poorer sleep quality. It's important because poor sleep quality has been linked to increased risk of diabetes and hypertension. Many obese men suffer from sleep apnea, another disorder that disrupts sleep patterns.  With this problem, you can stop breathing up to a hundred times of night -- and not even know it.  People who snore may also have this illness. The selection of the men in the study did not consider whether they had symptoms or a history of sleep apnea, according to newswise.com. However, the sleep study showed that 66 percent of the men did have obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), which was moderately severe in most cases. OSA can lead to an increased risk of heart disease, deadly accidents (the engineer on the Metro North train that veered out of control and killed four people...

We've all seen the commercials, the handsome middle-aged man taking his wife's hand and the next shot is of a slowly filling bathtub or, in the old days, a couple smoking side by side on the terrace with smiles on their faces. But medications like Viagra and Cialis are on the air all the time, as are ads for testosterone .  Now, while most men don't really need this hormone, did you know that men with truly low levels may suffer from sleep apnea?  And that sleep apnea can kill? Sleep apnea is a disorder that can happen to anyone but usually affects those who are overweight or obese. What happens is that, when you're sleeping, you stop breathing, as many as hundreds of times a night.  You don't know you're doing this because you're asleep, but it can hurt your heart, even over time cause heart attacks, and it can be a silent killer. According to the the NIH's National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, breathing pauses can last from a few seconds to...

Guess you can't blame your mother's side of the family anymore for your baldness.  That used to be the old wives' tale about whether or not you'd lose your hair.  If the male relatives on her side lost their hair, chances are, you'd be next. But a whole new theory is evolving about hair loss. According to newswise.com, it's gravity. That's right, gravity.  How much your scalp weighs on your hair follicles. "In youth, the scalp has sufficient fat tissue under the skin, and it is 'capable of keeping itself well-hydrated,' buffering the pressure on hair follicles," as the Web site reports comments by Dr. Emin Tuncay Ustuner, a plastic surgeon in Ankara, Turkey. But with aging, "the skin and underlying (subcutaneous) fat become thinner, and the pressure on the hair follicles increases. Testosterone contributes to thinning of the subcutaneous fat." As the cushion of fat decreases, the hair follicle must strive against higher p...

A friend just had a third daughter.  I asked how he's doing with all that estrogen in the house.  He rolled his eyes.  But scientists have recently learned that he's contributing, too. According to Gina Kolata, "Estrogen, the female sex hormone, turns out to play a much bigger role in men’s bodies than previously thought, and falling levels contribute to their expanding waistlines just as they do in women’s." Until recently, she notes, testosterone deficiency was considered "nearly the sole reason that men undergo the familiar physical complaints of midlife."       A recent study put the end to that way of thinking. “Some of the symptoms routinely attributed to testosterone deficiency are actually partially or almost exclusively caused by the decline in estrogens,” Kolata quotes Dr. Joel Finkelstein, an endocrinologist at Harvard Medical School and the study’s lead author, from a news release put out on Wednesday.       "While dwin...

Anthony Weiner may be proud of his junk.  But does he know that large testicles are now linked with heart disease? A new study of almost 3,000 men with sexual dysfunction in Italy has found " a link between risk factors for heart disease -- such as obesity, smoking and high blood pressure -- and larger testicles," according to Rachael Rettner at huffingtonpost.com. "Having larger testicles was also linked with a slightly increased risk of being hospitalized for   heart disease , which could be due to the risk profile of men with larger testes, the researchers said," Rettner reports. The story was much more glorious for men with large testicles in the past.  Rettner notes that  larger testicles "were considered a sign of good reproductive health," not that long ago, so the link between large testicles and poor health surprised researchers. So, why?  The study pointed out that men with health problems, such as diabetes and heart disease, ...

As if men didn't have enough to worry about, now a new study  links sudden declines in testosterone to Parkinson's disease symptoms, and possibly, the disease itself. According to newswise.com, you can relax.  It's only happening in mice.  “While scientists use different toxins and a number of complex genetic approaches to model Parkinson’s disease in mice, we have found that the sudden drop in the levels of testosterone following castration is sufficient to cause persistent Parkinson’s like pathology and symptoms in male mice,” Dr. Kalipada Pahan, lead author of the study and the Floyd A. Davis endowed professor of neurology at Rush, was quoted by the Web site. Still, since men's testosterone levels are "coupled" with many diseases, according to Pahan, it makes sense to look further when levels drop suddenly.  Drops in testosterone levels due to stress or other drastic events in a man's life can predispose him to Parkinson's-like symptoms, Pahan ...