For every bad thing that happens in the world, testosterone is blamed but the biggest of all raps against the hormone comes from the biomedical community that has long been maintaining a correlation between elevated testosterone levels and a suppressed immune system.

A completely changed role for the hormone was suggested by Stanton Braude, Ph.D., a lecturer in biology in Arts and Sciences and a biologist at the Washington University in St. Louis.

From Sciencedaily.com:

Braude came across a new body of research — about a dozen studies in all over the past five years — that questions the whole idea of immunosuppression and suggests that, instead of suppressing the immune system, testosterone and other steroids play a key role in what’s called immunoredistribution.

“The redistribution hypothesis predicts that when you are under stress the total number of immune cells in your body remains the same but are sent where they are most useful — to the skin to anticipate getting wounded and prevent infection,” Braude explains. “This makes perfect sense from an evolutionary standpoint. Now, today, with people constantly stressed, those immune cells aren’t protecting your gut from a virus or your lungs from an infection or a cold. So, you might get these illnesses, but the immune cells are out there protecting the skin. Personally, between gangrene and a cold, I’ll take the cold.”

Braude’s new idea is that testosterone signals infection-fighting white blood cells to go out of the blood stream and into the skin. He says it’s also possible that testosterone merely triggers the stress response, and other steroids from the adrenal gland then execute the redistribution.

“The bottom line is that a blood test of a highly parasitized breeding male peacock would show high testosterone but low white blood cell counts because the cells are temporarily out of the blood stream and in the skin,” Braude says.

This latest testosterone immunoredistribution hypothesis from Braude appeared in an issue of Behavioral Ecology.