100mg DHEA Per Day Can Protect Skeletal Muscle From Damage During Short Phases of Intensified Training
In 
one of their latest papers researchers from the University of Texas at Austin report the adrenal hormone and steroid precursor dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) had profound ameliorative effects on the exercise induced skeletal muscle damage in 16 young college aged men who completed a 5-day mixed-type (5x steady state cardio + 5x strength training + 1x shuttle run / HIIT) exercise protocol [1]. The 100mg/day of supplemental DHEA the subjects in the active arm of the study received totally blunted the profound creatine kinase increase (+300%) on day 4 of the intervention and lead to sustained increases in serum DHEA and transient increases in serum testosterone levels, which reached statistical significance only in the first two days of the experiment. These results, which stand in contrast to previous studies by Brown et al. [2] and Ostojic et al. [3] involving less taxing exercise regimen, suggest that the usefulness of DHEA supplementation may depend on exercise intensity. Incidentally, the dreaded pro-estrogenic effects of DHEA supplementation were observed in none of the studies: While Liao et al. did not even bother measuring estrogen levels, Brown et al. found no changes in estrogen or one of its metabolites after 8 weeks of strength training and 50mg DHEA and Ostelic et al. observed increases in both estrogen (+21%) and total testosterone (+37%) in 20 healthy young soccer players in response to 100mg/day of DHEA after 4 weeks. Click here for details
References:
[1] Liao YH, Liao KF, Kao CL, Chen CY, Huang CY, Chang WH, Ivy JL, Bernard JR, Lee SD, Kuo CH. Effect of dehydroepiandrosterone administration on recovery from mix-type exercise training-induced muscle damage. Eur J Appl Physiol. 2012 May 16. [Epub ahead of print]
[2] Brown GA, Vukovich MD, Sharp RL, Reifenrath TA, Parsons KA, King DS. Effect of oral DHEA on serum testosterone and adaptations to resistance training in young men. J Appl Physiol. 1999 Dec;87(6):2274-83.
[3] Ostojic SM, Calleja J, Jourkesh M. Effects of short-term dehydroepiandrosterone supplementation on body composition in young athletes. Chin J Physiol. 2010 Feb 28;53(1):19-25.
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