I am on TRT, and I am contemplating donating plasma as it pays a lot where I am (buddy just made $550 CASH in a month for a little over 2 hours a week), and a donation place is literally a block off of my route back from work.
But I am not interested in it if my testosterone is going to drop from it. Does anyone know if this will happen?
Do you mean platelets?
Specifically the plasma. Platelets is a different thing you can donate.
Doubtful. They usually replace plasma with saline so the blood wont thicken from the loss. I do platelets every couple months and I haven’t noticed anything different.
Yeah, I used to donate plasma before trt. They take out about 850 ml of plasma, and put back 500 ml of saline.
My concern is that the plasma itself may contain testosterone.
Do you get paid for platelets?
Right, and platelets are gold. Chemotherapy patients need them as chemo wipes out their platelets. Ever heard of a chemo patient that had could not have treatment because blood counts were too low? It’s the platelets, transfusion or wait a week or so for them to build back up. They’ll bleed out if platelets are low.
Necro bump
I donated plasma 2x/wk for the better part of 18 months and also have blood test results with 335ng/dl TT; curious if these could be related. (bloods were drawn >2years after last plasma donation)
So, the Testosterone is in the plasma. During plasma donation, they put saline into the blood. So you removed Testosterone and put back something else. So in the short term, yes it does lower it. By how much, I don’t really know how to quantify it. If I knew how much plasma there was total, I could have a guess.
I would guess the effect is rather small, and for a short duration. A day or two later, and I would think you would be back to baseline.
I don’t have an answer for you here.
So they are taking out roughly a third of your plasma. I would then think that a guy would see a short term drop in Test, by about 1/3. Perhaps right after donating, one would have about 2/3 of their previous testosterone level.
I always donated 880 mL per visit due to weight.
Outside of the temporary reduction in TT as it is bound to plasma (correct me if I’m wrong), is there anything to indicate this could induce a long-term effect on TT? I don’t think there is, but you are clearly more educated on this than I am
Just another outlet for your endogenous T that you produce. So in terms of your HPTGA and feedback loop, this drop in free T & free E2 would signal back to your H and P to make more T so overall positive feedback on your H and P.
Did you ever measure LH and FSH prior to plasma donations and then again after you’d been doing it awhile? I’d guess your LH and FSH would be higher after regular plasma donation; sort of the effect of a SERM but that’s just conjecture. My guess is a minor effect overall.
I don’t have any pre-donation labs, unfortunately. I have current labs if you’re interested, but that doesn’t show the information needed.
Thank you for the information, welcome back!
