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Comment by doix | Hacker News Reader

In the powerlifting community, it was a pretty well known fact. None of my women friends that competed (that weren't on anabolic steroids) would be on hormonal birth control because it would affect their training.

I'm surprised the article mentions it's not known by doctors.

I'm also surprised that male birth control pills don't exist yet. In my mind it is the easiest thing ever, exogenous testosterone basically solves the problem. We know it's fairly reversible because lifters go on that stuff for years and then still manage to have kids.

It's "just" a matter of figuring out the correct dosages and figuring out how long before it becomes effective.

I suspect significantly more men would be willing to take birth control pills if it was making them "jacked".

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My understanding is that one reason for lack of prescription birth control for men is that the side effects of a drug will inevitably outweigh any possible health benefit from avoiding conception, which for a male is of course nil. Birth control is easily justified from a medical perspective for women because pregnancy carries many health risks.

> pregnancy carries many health risks

So does breathing. (In fact, it causes death in 100 percent of the cases.)

No, that's just cope for the fact that it is already socially acceptable for women to ruin their bodies for vanity purposes.

breathing is a bad faith argument. Im sure you can think of a better example here

No it isn't. Oxygen is highly corrosive and is a literal poison.

Everything is poison at some dose, but that isn't the discussion it seems.

There are two problems. The first is while testosterone reduces fertility, it does not reduce it sufficiently without another steroid like progestin. The second is that testosterone must be injected or reliable birth control and self-injection is a problem for many men.

Has broscience gone too far?

Is there data that suggests testosterone would work as a male birth control?

Yes, exogenous testosterone will shut down the testicles and thus lower sperm production. Here's a random paper [0] but there's a lot of material out there.

The hard part is balancing the sterilisation effect with other side effects whilst having good efficacy. And then there's also the problem of reversing the effects.

I'm not on the pharmaceutical business, there's probably a good reason it doesn't exist yet. I just don't know if it's a legal/public perception thing regarding anabolic steroids, it's too hard to manage the side effects or if it's something else.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6305868/

It shows 65% being infertile within 4 months and some hadn't become fertile again thereafter. Totally aside from side effects that seems to me to be useless.

It takes about four months for one sperm to form so really any male birth control short of a semen valve is going to have that latency.

Is sex education that bad? Do people think it's made on demand?

The knowledge(?) that it takes 4 months for sperm to form is certainly not common knowledge. I've never heard it before. I haven't looked it up yet, but I'm definitely questioning whether this is even scientifically accepted

Talk to a fertility specialist sometime. You'll discover many new things that you hadnt heard of yet.

It was a great example for me of mass ignorance. Tons of stuff, including this, are very well established, but since we live is such an individualized society where interactions with kids and parents are no longer something that happens at all ages continuously throughout life, and your similarly aged friends for the same reason neither, could it happen that such facts simply never pop up until somebody runs into them.

In 30 years, you'll not believe established science about aging.

It’s actually between 60-70 days, which is 2–2,5 months.

Plus, some personal variability. 3-4mo is a good amount to take into account, if you ever need to.

Variance generally goes both ways. If the true average is 2-2,5 months you should take that as average expected value, not 4 months. Following your logic it’s equally valid to claim 0 months lol

Without any further information, given what we know about sperm production (it's a physical process for which we're measuring time), the expected distribution is not normal (probably exponential or something). The claim that 'variance goes both ways' is wrong. Variance can only go one way. It can go one way mostly, or it can go bothways, or it can take a U shape. It all depends on the distribution of the events.

If we take it to be a simple exponential distribution with mean 66 days, then lambda = 1/66. and variance is 4356 or a standard deviation of 66 days as well.

In that case, by month 4, about 83% of men would be expected to have sperm in their semen.

To delve deeper, what you're missing here is the idea of skewness and kurtosis. These are the 'higher moments' of the probability distribution function (natural extensions of mean, variance, etc). In particular, the skewness is where you're getting hung up. You assume in your first sentence that the skewness of every pdf is zero (i.e., it 'goes both ways'). That is not generally the case.

In particular, the skewness of the 'time to first sperm' distribution must be very positive because it can never be below zero.

Most biological processes are modelled and assumed as being normally distributed due to the central limit theorem.

If you were talking about how much sperm they had exponential would indeed be better. But we’re not. Just if they have any.

If the average time it takes is 2,5 months, you should expect to wait on average 2,5 months, not 4.

That is indeed not the same as asking when do 83% of men have sperm, since 83% is not the average.

> Most biological processes are modelled and assumed as being normally distributed due to the central limit theorem.

Things cannot be distributed where the distribution has values the thing can never have. The time until an event cannot be negative. The cdf of a normal distribution always has a non-zero value at zero. There is no chance a sperm is ejaculated before it's made. That's a logical impossibility. Thus time to first sperm is absolutely not normally distributed.

No, thats not how calculating quantities with tolerances work. Lol.

the possibility of permanent infertility is a dealbreaker for me, even if its small.

I think that would be a dealbreaker for most. My only purpose here was to point out that even if you had an on/off switch for sperm production, the latency between starting/stopping the treatment and seeing a cessation/initiation of sperm in the semen is going to be on the order of several months

That's the desired effect for me, I'd have had a vasectomy already if it seemed safe enough. Pretty much 100% of the anecdotes you get are people saying it's nothing and they were powerlifting the next day, but then you look up the incidence of chronic ballache...

There is a study that shows this effect months later for 65% of men some of which didn't get their fertility back as well as causing enlargement of the prostate. This was in men who would otherwise benefit from testosterone replacement not men with a healthy level of testosterone essentially juicing.

It would not be tested explicitly for such because it is both bad at its job and has negative side effects well known from all the steroid users.

Initially hormonal BC was invented for men, but the side effects annoyed the male doctors, so they transitioned to female BC.

> I'm also surprised that male birth control pills don't exist yet. In my mind it is the easiest thing ever, exogenous testosterone basically solves the problem.

It changes social behavior, including voting patterns, in ways contrary to the desires of our rulers.

Whilst I think your comment is tinfoil stuff, I do wonder if the birth-control pill can have psychological effects that alter voting patterns. After all, it's true of Paracetamol (Acetaminophen), which makes you less reactionary.

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