I just turned 40 and the present I got was no libido and sweats with very very mild physical exertion. My drive to go to gym is practically dead.
I saw GP (NHS) and then andrologist and ofcourse absolutely suck! Because all numbers came within range they basically said everything is fine (funnily enough some other numbers (WBC) were very low but as I am not symptomatic for those .. they said let's ignore it!).
So have invested a lot of my own money to do blood tests. I would say the test show, these main problems:
low TSH
low T4
lowish T3
high E2
high SHBG
high prolactin
(all within lab ranges, but out of functional ranges, and I am symptomatic)
I have attached lab reports - any hints. At the moment I am thinking of buying T4 and T3 myself and starting with small doses to see how I respond.
Written by
kuteguy
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I think that your TSH is surprisingly low for these results, but doctors, sadly, will say your thyroid results are normal. If you try thyroid meds, you might drive your TSH very low even with low doses, and doctors won't like that. I'm not saying you shouldn't do anything about these results, just warning you of the likely outcome, and you would need to be prepared for a very negative attitude from doctors if your TSH went very low and you were self-medicating thyroid meds.
However, before buying thyroid meds and trying them, there is something else you should check. If cortisol levels are wrong for you - either too high or too low - this can make you sweat. It will also affect your thyroid results - e.g. high cortisol can lower TSH. Unfortunately, there is a lot of overlap between the symptoms of low cortisol and high cortisol, so guessing isn't a good idea. Instead proper testing should be done.
The best tests for cortisol are saliva testing rather than blood testing. It is a good idea to have DHEA tested at the same time as the saliva tests are done, and a couple of companies will do both things with one test bundle. The one I'm familiar with is the Genova Diagnostics UK test but Regenerus provide DHEA as part of their test too (I think) :
See these links for general info on private testing generally, and Genova and Regenerus in particular :
Read the Description/Analytes/Requirements tabs as well as the Additional Resources links down the right hand side of the page.
Note that ordering from Genova is not standard and straightforward, nor is getting your results. See this link and read it all to find out how it is done :
If you look at the thumbnail you can see it mentions lots of female sex hormones. But men do produce small amounts of female sex hormones and women produce small amounts of male sex hormones. I would strongly recommend checking how much of the video applies to a male!
If your body runs low on pregnenolone it ditches the production of sex hormones shown in the right hand half of the thumbnail picture in the video and concentrates on the left hand side of it. So, is your DHEA low? or testosterone? If you don't know it would be worth finding out. I don't know what would make pregnenolone drop, I've never investigated it.
Another possible problem is if the body decides it needs more cortisol for any reason. It will again prefer to ditch the sex hormones in preference to cortisol. People can live without sex hormones, but they can't live without cortisol.
When the body runs low on thyroid hormones, the body uses cortisol as the "next best thing". So, one sequence of events could be :
Another possibility is that cortisol is the thing that goes wrong first for some reason.
2) Cortisol rises for some unknown reason -> sex hormones decrease and thyroid hormones decrease, but I don't know which of these two would happen first or if they would both decline together.
I think I've exhausted my knowledge on this subject now. Be aware I have no medical training.
Oh - it might be relevant to your problems if you've been taking things to help your gym performance. Depending on what you were taking I imagine it could throw all sorts of things out of kilter.
Thanks humanbean! That's a lot for me to go on with .. Appreciate it. I am not on any medication at all.
My T level is on the high side of normal (which is opposite to my teen/20s when my Test was on the low end of normal); my SHBG and E2 are just one point higher than the normal range -> so they are high. My theory here is that the high SHBG is meaning I have less bio/free T and so my body is being signalled to produce higher T. So along with high SHBG and high E2 (which might be inter-related) I am getting the Libido issues because there is less free T to be used.
I will organise for a 4 x Saliva Cortisol test and DHEA-S blood test (DHEA-S is a LOT cheaper than DHEA) via medichecks who I normally use for private blood tests. Sigh .. more money on tests.
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Got my strange results back after 6 weeks of being on T3.
Leading endos' replies to my question: "Can problems be caused by a suppressed TSH or high/over range T4/T3?" 
serum thyroid normal ranges
Need for T3 
High TSH on T3 & NDT
