Hormones
Does it help libido or sexual function?
Measured on validated questionnaires, which is the only way this gets measured in a trial.
0
people in trials
3
human studies
1
compounds, animal or cell only
1
trials found nothing
Measured in people
Ranked by how many people, which is a fact about the evidence and not a judgement about the compound. The one at the top is the most studied, which is not the same as the best. Counts are never added across compounds, because the same person can appear in more than one trial.
- no headcount stated1 human study1 found nothing
found nothingThe T-Trials. Treatment raised testosterone into the mid-normal range for men aged 19 to 40. Sexual activity, sexual desire and erectile function all improved significantly. Vitality did not improve on the fatigue scale. The proportion improving 6-minute walking distance by at least 50 m did not differ in the Physical Function Trial but did when all three trials were pooled, 20.5% against 12.6%, p = 0.003. Mood and depressive symptoms were slightly better. Adverse event rates were similar.
New England Journal of Medicine, 2016 · no headcount in the line
- no headcount stated1 human study
A randomised study of the same class of alpha-MSH analogue in men with organic rather than psychogenic erectile dysfunction, extending the erection and sexual desire findings to a harder population. Small, and again with the melanocortin class side effects.
Urology, 2000 · no headcount in the line
- no headcount stated1 human study
Thirty pre- and postmenopausal women with sexual dysfunction, randomised double-blind placebo-controlled crossover over 22 weeks, 32 IU of intranasal oxytocin or placebo before intercourse. Female Sexual Function Index rose 26% on oxytocin and 31% on placebo, Sexual Quality of Life 144% and 125%, and sexual distress fell 36% and 45%. There was no statistically significant treatment, sequence or interaction effect. Both improved; the drug did not beat placebo.
Fertility and Sterility, 2015 · no headcount in the line
What people using it report
- Increased desire and arousal within a few hours.
Measured in animals or cells, not yet in people
These are separated from the trials above rather than ranked against them, because they answer a different question. A result in a rat is a real result and a reason somebody ran the study; it is not a measurement of what happens in you. Where the human work is missing, the reason is usually money rather than failure, and that is set out at the bottom of this page.
- 1 preclinical study
Measured in animals or cells
Rats, with an in vitro component. Galanin administration partially restored erectile function after cavernous nerve injury and mediated nitrergic nerve outgrowth in culture. Included because this rat result circulates in consumer settings without its species attached.
The Journal of Sexual Medicine, 2018 · animal
What people using these actually report
Uncontrolled self-reports, gathered from clinic write-ups, regulatory complaint records and public forums, and reproduced here as written. They are the best guide on this page to what people actually do, what they expect, and what goes wrong, and they cannot show that anything works, because nobody was measured against a placebo and the people who saw no effect mostly stopped posting. Both halves of that are true at once. The negative reports are kept in for the same reason.
- Increased desire and arousal within a few hours.
Sources: The nausea and flushing appear in the melanocortin controlled trials. The rest comes from forums including r/peptides and clinic write-ups, uncontrolled, in an area where the placebo arm of a randomised trial improved as much as the drug arm.
Why the trial record looks like this
A missing trial is usually a missing sponsor. Nobody runs a nine-figure programme on a molecule they cannot own, so the compounds with the thinnest human records are often the oldest and most freely available ones rather than the weakest. Taking Galanin as the example, because it states the problem most clearly:
A published research review on this project previously recorded that galanin has no human interventional data. That was wrong, and the correction is worth stating plainly: galanin has been infused into human volunteers in controlled studies since 1986, and there are dozens of such reports through the mid-1990s. Anyone searching only recent literature or only for galanin plus a behavioural term will miss them.
What the correction changes is smaller than it sounds. The human data are real and they are all endocrine and cardiovascular. Galanin in a human is a growth hormone secretagogue with autonomic effects and no measurable effect on insulin or glucose, and that is the complete picture the human record provides.
The reputation is built elsewhere. Galanin's standing as a neuropeptide of interest comes from rodent work on addiction, feeding, sleep and inflammation, delivered intracerebroventricularly or locally. The gap between that route and anything a person could take is the whole problem, and one of the human studies names it directly: after finding that galanin did not affect insulin in humans the way it does in dogs and rodents, those authors concluded that caution should be exercised in extrapolating a physiological role for galanin in humans from animal results. That sentence was published in 1989 and it is still the correct summary.
The heart rate finding deserves more attention than it gets. A rise from 70 to 99 beats per minute at rest, in healthy young men, during a one-hour infusion, is not a subtle signal.
A cognitive endpoint is a measured one: a validated test of working memory, processing speed, attention, executive function or episodic recall, administered before and after, against a control group who did not know which arm they were in. None of the compounds in this batch has ever been tested that way. Rating scales of fatigue, global clinical impression, anxiety or hyperphagia are not cognitive endpoints, and neither is a hormone level. This matters because the marketing for several of these compounds describes focus, clarity and mental energy, and the underlying studies measured none of those things.
A compound appears here only when a citation on its own page states this outcome and reports a result for it; naming it is not enough. Human, animal and cell work are counted separately and never merged. Participant counts are read from the study lines and deliberately undercount. Nothing here is advice, and nothing here is a recommendation to take or to avoid anything.