Originally posted by JohnWW
What do you want the testosterone for - to become an Olympic steroid drug cheat? Incidentally, natural testosterone is chiral (optically active),
while synthetic testosterone and its derivatives consists of a racemic mixture of the two enantiomers. It is this feature that enables the sports
drug-testers to distinguish between natural (presumably from testicles and adrenals) and exogenous synthetic testosterone.
However, testosterone, which is initially converted to the much more biologically active dihydrotestosterone by the enzyme 5-alpha-dihydrogenase, is
very quickly degraded to only very weakly androgenic steroids, such as androstenedione, and to some extent estrogens, by the liver, before excretion.
|