Testosterone drink that could stop you being so bashful

ATESTOSTERONE drink may be a new way to tackle severe shyness, say Dutch researchers. They found that a drink containing a few drops of the hormone helped people with social anxiety disorder — a phobia of social situations.

It’s thought that raising testosterone levels also increases levels of the brain chemical dopamine, which makes people feel confident and improves mood, say the researchers.

Social anxiety disorder, also known as social phobia, is a persistent and overwhelming fear of social situations and is one of the most common anxietyrelated illnesses. It’s thought to affect one in 20 people in Britain.

Diagnosis is based on a score calculated by asking how strongly people agree with statements such as ‘ social events scare me’ or ‘I avoid speaking to anyone in authority’; and observing physical symptoms such as avoiding eye contact, raised heart rate or sweating.

Patients are often offered cognitive behavioural therapy, which helps change unhelpful beliefs and behaviours, or antidepressants known as SSRIs, which boost levels of a brain chemical serotonin to improve mood.

But these treatments are successful for only half of patients, according to researchers at Radboud University in the Netherlands, who carried out the new study.

PREVIOUS research has indicated that testosterone has a key role in controlling how people react to threatening situations and whether they decide to approach them or shy away. It does this by activating the brain area involved in emotion — the amygdala.

A study in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research in 2012 showed socially anxious people have lower than normal levels of testosterone in their saliva.

In the new study, 19 women with social anxiety and 19 without were given a testosterone drink one day and a placebo on another, and then monitored to see if they avoided eye contact — one of the main characteristics of social anxiety — while looking at faces on a computer screen.

After the testosterone drink, gaze avoidance dropped significantly in those with social anxiety; an effect not seen after they’d had the placebo, or in healthy women, reports journal Psychoneuroendocrinology. Just how testosterone could have such an effect is not clear but one theory is that it boosts levels of dopamine in areas of the brain that control mood. Low dopamine has also been reported in patients with anxiety, and the Dutch researchers say this may mean messages are

not properly transported through the brain, altering the way it reacts to normal social situations — incorrectly perceiving them as threatening.

Further studies are planned to test the effect on men.

Commenting on the research, Dr Adam Perkins, a lecturer in the neurobiology of personality at King’s College London, says: ‘Anxiety disorders are more common in women, so it is plausible that testosterone levels might affect social anxiety.

‘But this is a relatively small, preliminary study and social anxiety is a complex phenomenon, which is not well understood.

‘ It is only when we have untangled the various components of social anxiety that we will be able to treat it fully.’

MEANWHILE, high levels of testosterone in the womb affect how masculine your facial features are as an adult, according to a study in the Royal Society journal Proceedings B.

Researchers measured levels of testosterone from the umbilical cord blood of 180 newborns, and then analysed their faces as adults.

The higher hormone levels, the more masculine the features were — of both men and women. This included wider brows, longer noses and greater distance between the eyes.