TYPES
Currently, there are two types of hypogonadism that has been recorded by medical experts around the world, which are listed below:
Primary Hypogonadism. For this type of the disease, this means that an infected individual lacks sex hormones in their body due to the low production that is caused by having problems with their gonads. This is also where it is diagnosed that your brain is still sending signals to your gonads for production of sex hormones, but are unable to do so due to the complications the gonads are currently facing.
Central (Secondary) Hypogonadism. In this type of the disease, the gonads are not the cause of this disease but instead, the patient’s brain, wherein the hypothalamus and pituitary gland (the parts of the brain responsible for controlling your gonads) are not working correctly, resulting in the disease developing in the patient’s gonads.
For Primary Hypogonadism, the main factors are various disorders such as autoimmune disorders (i.e., Addison’s disease and Hypoparathyroidism), genetic disorders (i.e., Turner Syndrome, Klinefelter syndrome), severe infections, liver and kidney diseases, undescended testes, hemochromatosis, radiation exposure, and surgery on the sexual organs.
For Central (Secondary) Hypogonadism, its main factors considered are the following: genetic disorders (i.e., Kallmann Syndrome), infections like HIV, pituitary disorders, inflammatory diseases (i.e., sarcoidosis, tuberculosis, and histiocytosis), obesity, rapid weight loss, nutritional deficiencies, use of steroids or opioids, brain surgery, radiation exposure, pituitary gland or hypothalamus injury, and a tumor inside or near the pituitary gland.
SYMPTOMS
There are two kinds of symptoms for this disease, mainly for men and women, which are listed below separately:
Symptoms for men:
- Body hair loss
- Loss of muscles
- Abnormal breast growth
- Growth of the penis and testicles are severely reduced
- Erectile dysfunction
- Osteoporosis
- Having low to absent sex drive
- Infertility
- Fatigue
- Hot flashes
- Having difficulties in concentrating
Symptoms for women:
- Lack of menstruation
- Breast growth being slow or absent at all
- Hot flashes
- Body hair loss
- Having low to missing sex drive
- Having milky discharges from the breasts