Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by mchannon | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

mchannon·

This is kind of sobering.

Standard male levels of testosterone are between 3-7 ng/mL.

Standard female levels of testosterone are between 0.1-0.7 ng/mL.

And you're over 10 ng/mL of this crap?

Even if this stuff is a fraction as bioactive as testosterone, having more of it might explain a few societal health trends.

View on HN

Wow I hadn't thought about that. Really puts it into perspective.

That's hardly an apples to apples comparison. A typical American has around 100 ng/mL selenium in their blood. By your logic, that's a toxic heavy metal that's ten times as bad as PFAS in terms of concentration. It's actually an essential cofactor in many biological processes. I'm not implying PFAS is harmless, but the dose makes the poison and it depends what biological processes are being interfered with.

Are you saying that if you have low testosterone, you should get this test?

Not sure what I'm saying.

Correlation v. causation isn't all that well known here.

pfas are estrogenic. And yes, it explains a few things.

What does it explain?

It explains nothing, anything in this thread will be pure conjecture unless there are peer reviewed studies that indicate otherwise.

This is the internet. If we can't offer up unsubstantiated conjecture, what are we even doing here?

We know that PFAS poisoning reduces sexual dimorphism (the difference between male and female physicality) and in animal studies it even affects dimorphic behavior. I.e. male and female animals in most species behave differently from each other, and when poisoned, they behave more similarly to each other.

The bush that people are beating around is the question as to whether this stuff is affecting sexual expression of humans en masse.

Guess I need to up the dose.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com