“Starting as early as childhood, young men have had the notion ingrained into their minds that their manhood is more important than their overall health,” says Dicken Ko, MD, Director of Massachusetts General Hospital’s regional urology program and past director of the kidney transplant program.

Ko says that men’s health in general is an often underreported and underrepresented topic, in part due to the uncomfortable nature associated with talking about subjects such as sexual dysfunction and mental health issues.

Here are just a few ways that researchers and clinicians at Massachusetts General Hospital are helping to raise awareness of and advance the field of men’s health:

Dr. Ko was also the urologist who led the first U.S. penis transplant along with plastic surgeon Curtis Cetrulo, MD, FACS, Director of MGH’s Vascularized Composite Allotransplantation Laboratory. Read about this surgical milestone and how it’s opening a frontier for complex transplants.

Male infertility affects almost half of the 45 million couples worldwide who have trouble conceiving, but current standard methods for diagnosing male infertility can be expensive, labor-intensive and require testing in a clinical setting. Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital have developed a smartphone-based semen analyzer that can be used to test for male infertility in the privacy of your own home.

3 to 4 million men in America have used steroids at some point. Recent findings from Aaron Baggish, MD, Associate Director of the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Cardiovascular Performance Program, show long-term use of illicit steroids can reduce the heart’s ability to pump blood throughout the body, damage the heart muscle’s ability to relax and may also cause a buildup of plaque that can lead to heart attacks.

The majority of veterans are men (as of September 2016, the VA estimates that there are 18,532,000 living male veterans and 1,861,000 female veterans). Home Base, a partnership of Mass General and the Red Sox Foundation, is the only private sector clinic in New England, and the largest private sector clinic in America, with the sole focus of helping at-risk veterans and military families. (photo courtesy of Home Base)

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