Efficacy and Safety of Testosterone Therapy Based on Guideline Recommendations; Re: Clinical Practice Guideline by the American College of Physicians

摘要

A clinical guideline provides physicians with the convenience of applying an appropriate treatment, but it can prevent physicians from alleviating a patients' worst-case scenarios. Therefore, physicians should strive to formulate a treatment policy by interpreting the common and different parts among guidelines. In this sense, we truly appreciate the recent informative work by Dr. Salter and Dr. Mulhall where they summarized the guidelines for ‘testosterone therapy for testosterone deficiency (TD)’ [1]. Despite the consensus that the effect of testosterone therapy in TD on several symptoms such as sexual function, whether testosterone therapy is advantageous for some areas associated with TD is still inconclusive among guidelines. Very recently, a guideline for testosterone therapy based on a systematic review supported by the American College of Physicians (ACP) was published [2,3] where the authors recommend testosterone therapy only for enhancing sexual function in TD.