AGELESS WOMAN

A urologist proposes a new approach to treating aging in women.

In this follow-up to Ageless Man (2017), Debled theorizes that many of the negative symptoms that are associated with aging and menopause in women can be attributed to a decline in testosterone production. The book reviews clinical evidence for such a decrease in testosterone and other hormones, and it goes on to draw connections between lower hormone levels and symptoms generally associated with menopause and aging, including muscle loss, Type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. Debled discusses each symptom in detail and talks about how it may be the result of androgen deficiency. As the book addresses existing research, it also makes suggestions for new areas of study with a focus on androgenic hormones in women. Debled concludes that the aforementioned physical conditions, which he calls the “androgenic diseases of menopause,” can be best treated with mesterolone supplements, though he acknowledges that mesterolone is not approved for use in the United States. He also discusses ways in which standard hormone replacement therapy, with its focus on estrogen and progesterone, is harmful. Over the course of this book, Debled presents a thought-provoking interpretation of clinical evidence that runs counter to accepted scientific practice. However, he doesn’t make a convincing case for his fundamental upending of conventional wisdom. Readers who are inclined to treat women’s aging as a natural process are sure to find the author’s perspective challenging. Throughout, Debled treats the symptoms of aging as extremely negative (“If you are over forty, don’t you believe yourself to be sick?”). In particular, he presents them as distasteful from an aesthetic perspective; his descriptions of older women (“Old, frustrated obese women often deploy ingenuity and diet-program calculations, generally without result”) are extremely unflattering. In addition, the book’s description of women’s sex organs as their “male genitalia,” because they respond to androgens, isn’t linguistically or conceptually standard.

The goal of the author’s method of treatment is the elimination of aging (“mature human beings will no longer know the inexorable decrepitude that leads to death at around age eighty”). To that end, Debled generally does a good job of explaining physiology in chapters detailing conditions associated with getting older and how they may be connected to decreases in hormone production. In the book’s conclusion, he links his advocacy of mesterolone treatment to an episode in his past, when his approach to treating impotence resulted in the end of his teaching career and his establishment of a private clinic. The observations and recommendations in this book are based on the author’s work there, which includes the use of mesterolone. The book does include research citations, although readers should be advised that many of the papers are in French and refer to Debled’s own work. The book is enthusiastic about reevaluating the aging process, but it does not provide enough evidence to persuade readers to try the treatment that it endorses, which isn’t approved by U.S. government regulators.

An impassioned but unconvincing argument for a medical treatment.