drtbear1967
Musclechemistry Board Certified Member
This is a very interesting paper from 2007 involving a plant species called Eucommia ulmoides(EU) and its ability to act as a phytoandrogen and potentiate sex hormones in the body. EU contains triterpenoids, which were shown to weakly activate the androgen receptor. However these unique triterpenoids have shown unusual properties. In rats given 50mg/kg and 100mg/kg of EU in the presence of DHT showed a 112-204% increase in AR-mediated gene expression, meaning boosts the anabolic effects of DHT. Researchers also showed that the EU extract can displace testosterone from the AR, which shows that it can truly act as a phytoandrogen and bind to the AR. Probably the most exciting data from the study was a 250-fold increase in anabolic activity in the presence of testosterone! Conversely, an increase in estrogen activity was noted when EU was combined with estrogen. This should be easy to mitigate by controlling estrogen levels when taking exogenous testosterone. Perhaps the only drawback in this research was a dose-dependent increase in prostate weight in rats given 50mg/d of EU with 5mg of IM testosterone. The underlying mechanism is no known at the time, but might also be controlled by the use of a 5a-reductase inhibitor. Overall, EU seems to be promising for a natural testosterone-potentiating agent.
