We've been asked a couple of times if our new product Mithras is stronger than M1T.
Until enough people take it, we can't answer confidently, but in order to try and approach an answer to this question, we took a close look at the anabolic:androgenic ratios for Mithras, M1T, and a few other compounds.
Hopefully most readers will be familiar with “A:A ratios”. They measure the anabolic and androgenic potencies of a drug, as compared to a standard. For oral steroids the standard is almost always methyl testosterone.
A ratio of 200:50, for example, would indicate that a drug was twice as anabolic, and half as androgenic, as methyl testosterone.
These figures are based on testing conducted on castrated rats, with most of the research being performed in the 1950s and '60s. The weight of the levator ani (tail-wagging muscle) was used as a marker of anabolic activity, and the weight of androgen-responsive tissues of the ventral prostate and seminal vesicles were used to determine androgenic activity.
This testing method was known as the Hershberger assay. One of the main ideas behind the assay is that the results should be reproducible. A second lab should be able to administer the same compound, under the same conditions, and get the same results as the first. In practice that often wasn’t the case.
Slight differences in testing conditions, such as the age and weight of rats used, or the length of the delay after castration before administration commenced, can significantly affect the results and cause discrepancies between testing results for the same compound.
Results for different compounds from the same laboratory are more likely to be reliable. Syntex (inventors of Masteron, Anadrol, and many others) tested many compounds over several years. Superdrol, phera, and dimethandrostenol (Mithras) were among those tested against methyltestosterone for anabolic activity. Of these, dimethandrostenol was easily the strongest. The anabolic activity of these compounds is shown in the graph below:
Julius Vida’s 1969 work “Androgens and Anabolic Agents” has stood the test of time as an excellent compendium of other researchers’ data, and has been the “go-to” source of promising candidates for resurrection since the rise of the “prohormone” industry.
It should be pointed out though, that there are some notable errors and omissions, and the figures in Vida’s book are quoted with little or no notice taken of methodological differences. For example, a few of the figures are from parabiotic experiments in which rats are cut open and stitched together for the duration of the experiment (a technique used to measure the anti-gonadotrophic, or ‘suppressive’ effects of a steroid), though no mention of that is made.
(For a less credulous and more investigative look at the relative activities of certain anabolic steroids, the reader is referred to Fred A. Kincl’s excellent chapter in “Methods in Hormone Research IV”.)
So, how reliable is the anabolic/androgenic ratio for the new prohormone dimethandrostenol likely to be? How will it stack up against other hormones of the past and present?
Syntex’s anabolic figure of 1040 for dimethandrostenol is taken from an article in the journal Endocrinology in which the a range of compounds were compared directly (precisely because of serious variances in values reported elsewhere).
The data shows dimethandrostenol to be 20 times stronger than methyl clostebol (Mechabol), and 3 times stronger than oxymetholone (Anadrol).
One prime example of the variance between laboratories can be seen with the results published for madol/desoxymethyltestosterone/pheraplex (phera, for convenience). When its inventors at the Mexican labs of Syntex sent it for biological testing at the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology, it was reported to have an anabolic potency 437% that of methyltestosterone. When tested by researchers from Searle (inventors of oxandrolone/Anavar), they reported it to be 1200% as anabolic as methyltest – nearly three times stronger. Clearly phera cannot be 2.74 times stronger than itself – it must be methodological differences that account for the conflicting results.
If we assume that either Searle’s results were regularly exaggerated (there's more examples that suggest this), or Syntex’s underestimated (it doesn’t matter which), and compare the reported anabolic potencies of a few of the better-known compounds they tested, dimethandrostenol looks even better – and even appears to be stronger than the previous “king” of bulking prohormones Methyl-1-Testosterone.
On this graph, Syntex’s results (superdrol, phera, and dimethandrostenol) are marked on the left Y axis, with Searle’s on the right Y axis. They are drawn to a different scale to show the peaks of methyltestosterone and pheraplex at the same height. It’s intended that this attempts to account for methodological differences between the results from the respective labs, though it’s only a rough graphical estimate.
Does this article, and these graphs give an accurate impression of the effects of dimethandrostenol in humans? Is Mithras really stronger than M1T? It remains to be seen, but the rat data certainly paints a picture of a very powerful anabolic.
References on request
