Evan Panken, MD, on testosterone therapy and atrial fibrillation, acute kidney injury

In this video, Evan Panken, MD, discusses the background and notable findings from the study “Association of Testosterone Replacement Therapy With Atrial Fibrillation and Acute Kidney Injury,” which he presented at the 2024 Sexual Medicine Society of North America Annual Meeting in Scottsdale, Arizona. Panken is a urology resident at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, Illinois.

Transcription:

Please provide an overview of this study and its notable findings.

With the TRAVERSE trial, really a landmark trial in our field that came out in 2023 in the New England Journal of Medicine, and that was the largest randomized, placebo controlled trial for hypogonadal men with testosterone replacement therapy. And one of the interesting secondary findings out of that study was they found an increased association of TRT or testosterone replacement therapy with AKI and atrial fibrillation. Given that finding being pretty novel, we wanted to look into a large database. So we used the TriNetX research network, and we queried that for men who are in a similar cohort to what was in the TRAVERSE trial. So it was gentlemen ages 45 to 80 who had 2 testosterone levels between 100 and 300 so in that hypogonadal range, they had to be within 3 months of each other, and then they also had preexisting cardiovascular disease or cardiovascular risk factors. Given that this study was retrospective and not randomized, we used propensity score matching to try and limit some of the confounding bias for gentlemen who are receiving testosterone replacement therapy. So in the end, we had, after the propensity score matching, we had 2134 men in each group, the testosterone replacement therapy group and the group that did not receive TRT. And in our study, we found an increased association with AKI or acute kidney injury in the group receiving testosterone replacement therapy. It was 3.5% in the TRT group, and 2.3% in the group that did not receive TRT, and we did not find a significant association with atrial fibrillation between the 2 groups. So those were the big findings out of our study. We did corroborate the findings of TRAVERSE in terms of AKI, but we did not find a difference when it came to atrial fibrillation.

This transcript was AI generated and edited by human editors for clarity.