---
title: "Selling Testosterone for Menopause, Well Ahead of the Science"
description: "Influencers call it a cure-all, U.S. regulators are listening, and the menopause researchers say: not quite yet"
author: "Inez Holloway"
published: 2026-09-26T08:00:00Z
modified: 2026-09-26T19:04:21Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/selling-testosterone-for-menopause-well-ahead-of-the-science-4633a1
language: en
tags: ["menopause", "health", "hormones", "regulation", "us"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Selling Testosterone for Menopause, Well Ahead of the Science

*Influencers call it a cure-all, U.S. regulators are listening, and the menopause researchers say: not quite yet*

By Inez Holloway · September 26, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/selling-testosterone-for-menopause-well-ahead-of-the-science-4633a1

## In brief

- Testosterone is not approved for menopause symptoms in Canada or the U.S., but off-label use is rising via social media
- U.S. regulators began evaluating testosterone for menopausal women in mid-September; feedback runs into mid-October
- Researchers say evidence supports it mainly for women whose ovaries were removed, not menopause generally
- Experts cite missing long-term safety data, cholesterol risks and side effects like unwanted hair and oily skin
- Most menopause testosterone research concerns post-menopausal women with hypoactive sexual desire disorder

There is a moment, scrolling, when a woman past a certain age begins to notice a pattern in the merchandise. Lately the merchandise is testosterone. It is offered for the sluggish sex drive and for the night sweats, by influencers and by physicians alike, though no regulator in Canada or the United States has approved it for menopause symptoms. Women are taking it off-label anyway. In mid-September, American regulators began formally weighing testosterone therapy for menopausal women and asked drugmakers to produce research designed for women — research that, by most existing accounts, does not yet exist.

“Women deserve to have testosterone options that are formulated and dosed specifically for them,” Dr. Dorothy Fink, deputy director of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, told a live-streamed workshop on Sept. 17.

Not quite yet. That is the answer multiple menopause researchers gave CBC News when asked whether solid science exists to back testosterone for menopause — not yet, and certainly not for every woman. The hormone is arriving at a strange hour in the history of hormone therapy, just as that therapy, long feared, is being rehabilitated and resold.

“In the past, a lot of the fear around hormone therapy was really not based on evidence,” said Dr. Marie Christakis, a gynecologist and researcher at the Weston and O’Born Centre for Mature Women’s Health at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto. “And now a lot of the salesmanship of hormone therapy is also not based on evidence.”

The fear had a date and a document. Menopause, in the simplest terms, is when a woman’s periods end for good; the transition before it can bring hot flashes, insomnia, vaginal dryness — unpleasant for some, debilitating for others. Estrogen-only and combined estrogen-progesterone therapies, in pills, creams and patches, were built to counter that. Then, in 2002, a major American clinical trial appeared to show that the benefits of combined therapy did not outweigh higher risks of breast cancer, heart disease and stroke.

Later research uncovered the study’s flaws: it had focused on older, post-menopausal women, skewing the risks. The fear did not recede on schedule, and use of hormone therapy dropped. In 2021, the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology issued a guideline calling menopausal hormone therapy the “most effective option” for symptoms like hot flashes, noting it can be used safely by most women under 60 or less than 10 years past menopause. And just last year, U.S. officials removed the longstanding “black box” warnings about cardiovascular disease, stroke, breast cancer and dementia — a move backed by the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada.

Which brings the question to testosterone. It is a sex hormone, produced in women at lower levels than in men, and it subsides early. “The evidence is actually that testosterone levels in pre-menopausal women decrease sometime in the early to mid-thirties,” said Dr. Jerrilyn Prior, a professor emerita of endocrinology and medicine at the University of British Columbia. Unlike estrogen and progesterone, whose production plunges, the ovaries keep making testosterone at steadily lower levels for years — so there is no physiological reason, she said, for menopausal women in general to take it.

“The only situation in which testosterone I think is necessary, and very helpful, is someone who’s had their ovaries removed,” Prior said. “They don’t have that natural testosterone production anymore.”

The hormone has never really been part of the “true regime” of menopause therapy, said Dr. Shafeena Premji, founder and medical director of the Milestone Menopause Centre of Southern Alberta and a board member of the Canadian Menopause Society. Most research on testosterone in menopause concerns post-menopausal women with hypoactive sexual desire disorder — “this is where a woman has low desire that is causing personal distress,” she said — and even that distress can run to other medical conditions, medication side effects, mood disorders, body image, stress. What troubles her is what modern women are being fed: “misinformation and misguidance.” “We can’t make false claims and promise things to women when we don’t actually have the research to back that up,” she said.

The American review is real, and slow: regulators are taking public feedback into mid-October, and the evaluation could run far longer. At the Food and Drug Administration’s September workshop, Rajita Patil, director of the UCLA Comprehensive Menopause Care Program, said the data are insufficient to recommend testosterone for mood, cognition or general well-being; oral testosterone, she added, is not recommended at all because of unfavourable effects on cholesterol. Other experts stressed the absence of long-term safety data in women and the possibility of unwanted physical effects.

> With testosterone, there’s a very fine line between \[potential benefits and\] starting to get hair where you don’t want it, and oily skin, and having to wash your hair every two days or something.

Prior’s advice, rendered to CBC News, sits oddly well beside Premji’s: a full medical assessment first, because “not every symptom is always related to perimenopause,” and other conditions must be screened out before everything is attributed to menopause.

Menopause itself is not a disease, Prior stressed, not a defect requiring correction. It is hard to sit with the influencer reels after reading that sentence. Anyone selling an understudied treatment for a healthy transition, she noted, might just have “something to gain.”