When did anyone last take her blood?
You have had yours done. You know your number, you know the word your doctor used about it, and you have turned that word over at 11pm more than once. Ten years of this, and the testing has run in one direction.
Both of you stopped. The lab only ever saw you.
The study people quote at you tested her too.
A 2023 analysis in Andrology ran NHANES data from 2011 to 2016 across 8,748 American adults.
https://doi.org/10.1111/andr.13496
That breaks down as 4,236 men and 4,512 women. Blood came out in the morning, on purpose, because hormones move across the day. The researchers then split everyone by sex and by age.
Her decade got its own column.
Women aged 41 to 64 came back with a shape the men never produced.
Against a reference of seven to eight hours, women in that band sleeping six hours or less carried 1.57 times the odds of low testosterone, with an interval of 1.10 to 2.27. Women sleeping nine hours or more carried 2.06 times the odds, interval 1.18 to 3.59.
Both ends of the range, both significant.
For women the researchers set the low band at 15.06 ng/dL and under, drawn from the bottom third of the distribution. The average across all the women read 18.82.
Her curve has two bad ends.
The study measured her blood and stopped there.
Nobody asked these women a single question about desire, arousal or their sex lives. The design cannot tell you which came first either, because the questionnaire and the blood draw happened on the same day.
Anyone selling you this paper as an explanation for your bedroom is selling you something.
It gives you a reason to get her tested. Nothing more, and nothing less.
Tonight’s work needs one question and no equipment.
Open a note and write down what you know about her nights. Does she wake? How many times? Since when? Does she lie there at 3am with her back to you?
If the note stays empty, you have your finding.
Then ask her, and keep it away from sex. “When did you last sleep through the night?” She will answer that one. She has been waiting years for someone to notice.
Book your own bloods this week and say out loud that she should book hers. Routine women’s panels leave testosterone and SHBG off the form unless somebody asks.
The authors think wakings explain this whole pattern. The reason they could not prove it sits below.
