ArticleAmerican journal of physical anthropology2016
Associations between male testosterone and immune function in a pathogenically stressed forager-horticultural population.
Article in American journal of physical anthropology, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 61 citations in OpenAlex.
- Systematic review and meta-analysis of serum total testosterone and luteinizing hormone variations across hospitalized Covid-19 patients.Scientific reports · 2024Pooled it
- Social determinants drive lymphedema severity and treatment adherence: evidence from a three-year retrospective cohort study.Supportive care in cancer : official journal of the Multinational Association of Supportive Care in Cancer · 2026Article
- Further integrating social context into comparative and environmental physiology.The Journal of experimental biology · 2026Review
- Understanding the Secular Decline in Testosterone: Mechanisms, Consequences, and Clinical Perspectives.International journal of molecular sciences · 2026Review
- Amazonian Shuar testosterone levels are related to parasite infection: immunocompetence handicap hypothesis implications.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2026Article
- Childhood skeletal lesions common in prehistory are present in living forager-farmers and predict adult markers of immune function.Science advances · 2025Article
- Gender-Related Differences in Hospitalization Outcomes of Acute Pancreatitis: A Retrospective Analysis.Cureus · 2025Article
- Women suffering from systemic lupus erythematosus are characterized by low blood levels of α-dicarbonyl compounds.Archives of medical science : AMS · 2024Article
- Energetic costs of testosterone in two subsistence populations.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2023Article
- The best of both worlds: no apparent trade-off between immunity and reproduction in two group-living African mole-rat species.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- The Pathological Activation of Microglia Is Modulated by Sexually Dimorphic Pathways.International journal of molecular sciences · 2023Review
- Ecoimmunology in the field: Measuring multiple dimensions of immune function with minimally invasive, field-adapted techniques.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2022Review
- Evidence for an adolescent sensitive period to family experiences influencing adult male testosterone production.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Hormones and Sex-Specific Medicine in Human Physiopathology.Biomolecules · 2022Review
- Facial and body sexual dimorphism are not interconnected in the Maasai.Journal of physiological anthropology · 2022Article
- Sex-based differences in severity and mortality in COVID-19.Reviews in medical virology · 2021Review
- Potential Physiological and Cellular Mechanisms of Exercise That Decrease the Risk of Severe Complications and Mortality Following SARS-CoV-2 Infection.Sports (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Review
- Helminth infection is associated with dampened cytokine responses to viral and bacterial stimulations in Tsimane forager-horticulturalists.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2021Article
- Effects ofPathogens (Basel, Switzerland) · 2020Article
- Relationship of sanitation, water boiling, and mosquito nets to health biomarkers in a rural subsistence population.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
objectivesDespite well-known fitness advantages to males who produce and maintain high endogenous testosterone levels, such phenotypes may be costly if testosterone-mediated investment in reproductive effort trade-off against investment in somatic maintenance. Previous studies of androgen-mediated trade-offs in human immune function find mixed results, in part because most studies either focus on a few indicators of immunity, are confounded by phenotypic correlation, or are observational. Here the association between male endogenous testosterone and 13 circulating cytokines are examined before and after ex vivo antigen stimulation with phytohemagglutinin (PHA) and lipopolysaccharides (LPS) in a high pathogen population of Bolivian forager-horticulturalists. MATERIALS AND
methodsA Milliplex 13-plex cytokine panel measured cytokine concentration in whole blood samples from 109 Tsimane men aged 40-89 (median = 50 years) before and after antigen stimulation with PHA and LPS. Urinary testosterone was measured via enzyme immunoassay, demographic, and anthropometric data were collected as part of the Tsimane Health and Life History Project.
resultsHigher endogenous testosterone was associated with down-regulated responses in all cytokines after PHA stimulation (but significantly in only 2/13 cytokines), controlling for age and body mass index. In contrast, testosterone was not significantly associated with down-regulation of cytokines after LPS stimulation. MANOVAs indicate that men with higher testosterone showed reduced cytokine responses to PHA compared with LPS (p = 0.0098). DISCUSSION: Endogenous testosterone appears to be immunomodulatory rather than immunosuppressive. Potentially costlier forms of immune activation like those induced by PHA (largely T-cell biased immune activation) are down-regulated in men with higher testosterone, but testosterone has less impact on potentially less costly immune activation following LPS stimulation (largely B-cell mediated immunity).
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.