Assess your symptoms
Assessing your risk of hypogonadism is important, especially as you age, and monitoring your condition when you have been diagnosed will help you measure if your symptoms are improving or not.
By assessing risk or monitoring your condition yourself, you will be able to have more productive and useful conversations with your doctor.
Below we have four assessments which you can use at home. If you have any concerns, please speak to your doctor.
AMS questionnaire
The Aging Males’ Symptoms (AMS)
The Aging Males’ Symptoms (AMS) questionnaire is a simple way of measuring health-related quality of life in aging men and allows review of associated symptoms over time.[1] It is one of the most commonly used scales in the world for this purpose. [1]
The questionnaire assesses 17 areas of a person’s wellbeing and provides a score from 1 to 100, with lower scores indicating good quality of life and higher scores indicating presence of symptoms which may impact overall wellbeing. [1]
The AMS questionnaire can be used to review symptom relief over time for those who are on testosterone therapy so your doctor may ask you to complete the questionnaire at intervals throughout the year.
Please note, the tool is not a method of diagnosing testosterone deficiency, this requires further investigation and biochemical tests to confirm a diagnosis. It may, however, be useful in identifying presence and severity of symptoms and indicate the need for further testing. [2] [3]
1
100
References
1. Heinemann L, et al. Health Qual Life Outcomes. 2003; 1: 15.
2. Lunenfeld B, et al. Aging Male. 2015 Mar; 18(1): 5–15.
3. Kumar et al. J Adv Pharm Technol Res. 2010 Jul-Sep; 1(3): 297–301.
Androgen Deficiency Aging Males, AMS = aging males’ symptoms, BMI = body mass index.