Whether 1-androstenediol has more oral bioavailability than androst-1-ene itself, I don’t know, though I think I have read the data in a study back in the 1950s. If there was a difference between the diol, the dione,
and the 17-ol-3-one (that is to say, androst-1-ene) it wasn’t large. There would be no reason to expect the 3-ol to have better bioavailability than the 3-one. If anything it would be more prone to excretion since excretion is more of 3-ol’s.
Anyway, no, no point in taking the diol in preference to adding more androst-1-ene itself or adding more MAG-10, unless the diol simply happened to be on hand. It would be less preferable.<P.
Nor-4-androstenediol certainly has anabolic value.
1-androstenediol itself probably has no intrinsic anabolic activity, though, unlike 4-AD and nor-4-AD. I base this on the fact that by injection, while the parent steroid (androst-1-ene) has 2-4 times the potency of testosterone by animal assay, the diol has only 40%. Either the entire 40% or certainly the great majority of it can be accounted for by conversion, leaving little or no anabolic activity that could be coming from the diol itself.
As mentioned before the entire “anabolic/androgenic ratio” thing needs to be forgotten in bodybuilding. What these numbers are, is effectiveness in increasing size of the rat levator ani, and effectiveness in increasing the size of the rat prostate. If these measurements were called what they were, e.g. “the rat levator ani/prostate ratio” then most likely they’d get the attention, or lack of, that they deserve; but somehow giving a different name to it, a name that does not describe the actual measurements, the numbers and the ratio are wrongly assumed to be of great importance.