Movember: The Men’s Health Checks Worth Doing Before 40

Movember · Men’s health

By Jamie Walston · Beverly Hills Rejuvenation Center · Reviewed by the BHRC Clinical Team

Blood pressure, blood sugar, hepatitis C, HIV, alcohol and mood — the checks with real guideline backing before forty. Plus the three the guidelines recommend against, including one we happen to sell.

1. What Movember actually is

It started twenty-two years ago as a small idea between friends in Australia: grow moustaches, raise a bit of money, and get people talking about men’s health. It has since funded more than AUD $1.8 billion in prevention-focused work across three areas — in Movember’s own ordering: mental health and suicide prevention, prostate cancer, and testicular cancer.

Note which comes first in that list. The campaign’s own framing puts mental health at the top, and it would misrepresent the thing to leave it out. This article is mostly about blood tests and blood pressure cuffs, because that is what a med spa can sensibly talk about — but if the mental-health part is the part that applies to you, that is a conversation for your physician, and in the US the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available by call or text, any time.

2. The baseline: what actually has guideline support before 40

The US Preventive Services Task Force grades recommendations A through D, plus “I” for insufficient evidence. A and B mean do it. C means offer it selectively. D means the Task Force recommends against it. Here is what applies to a man in his twenties, thirties or early forties.

Two things worth reading carefully. First, the blood pressure recommendation also says to confirm a raised office reading outside the clinical setting before starting treatment — a home cuff or ambulatory monitoring — because a single high reading in a clinic is not a diagnosis. Second, the prostate cancer recommendation has no entry at all for men under 55. The Task Force did not assign a grade to routine PSA screening in younger average-risk men; it simply doesn’t recommend it. Anyone who tells you “USPSTF says get a PSA at 40” is describing a recommendation that does not exist. Men with a family history of prostate cancer, and Black men, are discussed separately in urological and oncology guidance and should raise it with a physician — that is a different conversation, and it belongs with a doctor rather than with us.

On the testicular D grade — read it properly

A D grade here means the Task Force found no benefit from routine screening programmes in men with no symptoms. It does not mean “don’t check yourself,” and it absolutely does not mean ignore a change. Testicular cancer is the most common solid cancer in young men and cure rates are high even when it presents late. A new lump, swelling, heaviness or ache in a testicle gets seen promptly. That is not screening — that is a symptom, and symptoms have always been a different thing.

3. The numbers behind the numbers

Blood sugar: the exact thresholds

These come from the American Diabetes Association’s Standards of Care, and it is worth knowing them because “your sugar was a little high” is not a result.

The USPSTF recommendation covers adults 35 to 70 with overweight or obesity. If you are under 35, or at a normal weight, screening is not routinely recommended — which is not the same as saying it can’t be useful information, only that the evidence base for doing it systematically isn’t there.

Cardiovascular risk: what replaced the old calculator

If you have had your risk estimated before, it was probably with the pooled cohort equations. The American Heart Association released the PREVENT equations in 2023, derived and validated in data from over 6.5 million US adults. Two things about them matter for a man under forty:

• They are validated from age 30, for adults 30 to 79 without known cardiovascular disease — so a thirty-something can now get a meaningful estimate, which was not really true before.
• They give a 30-year estimate as well as a 10-year one. That is the number that actually means something at 35. A 10-year risk at that age is reassuringly low almost regardless of how you live; a 30-year risk is not.

PREVENT is also the first risk tool to combine cardiovascular, kidney and metabolic measures — it takes kidney function and, optionally, A1C and urine albumin-creatinine ratio. That matters because those three systems fail together, and looking at only one of them was always an artefact of how medicine is organised rather than how bodies work.

At 35, the useful question is not “what is my risk this decade.” It is “what does the next thirty years look like if nothing changes.”

4. Testosterone — where a med spa has to be most careful

We offer testosterone therapy at several of our locations, and this is the section where a clinic’s incentives and a reader’s interests pull hardest in opposite directions. So here is the guideline position, stated plainly.

• Screening asymptomatic men for low testosterone is not recommended. Not by the Endocrine Society, not by urological guidance. A testosterone level in a man with no symptoms is a number without a question attached to it.
• Diagnosis requires symptoms plus unequivocally low morning total testosterone on two separate occasions. Two draws, both in the morning, both low, in a man who has symptoms. That is the Endocrine Society’s standard, and a single afternoon level is not a diagnosis.
• Morning timing is not a formality. Testosterone follows a daily rhythm and is highest early. A level drawn at 4pm can look low in a man whose morning level is entirely normal.
• Reference ranges vary between laboratories. A result flagged “low” by one lab’s range may sit comfortably inside another’s. Ask what range was used.

What TRAVERSE settled, and what it didn’t

For a decade the central question about testosterone therapy was cardiovascular safety. TRAVERSE (New England Journal of Medicine, 2023) was the trial designed to answer it — a large randomised cardiovascular safety trial in middle-aged and older men with hypogonadism and either existing cardiovascular disease or high risk of it. It found testosterone therapy non-inferior to placebo for major adverse cardiac events.

That is a genuinely reassuring result and it changed the conversation. But the trial also recorded higher rates of some secondary events in the testosterone group — including pulmonary embolism, atrial fibrillation and acute kidney injury — and the FDA issued class-wide labeling changes for testosterone products on 28 February 2025 in light of the accumulated evidence. The honest summary: the big cardiovascular fear was not confirmed; the drug is still a drug.

The thing that gets skipped: fertility

Exogenous testosterone suppresses sperm production. This is not a side effect, it is the mechanism — it is why testosterone was studied as a male contraceptive. Recovery of spermatogenesis after stopping is usual but takes months and is not guaranteed on any timetable. Any man who wants children in the future needs this discussed before he starts, not after. There are approaches that raise testosterone without suppressing fertility, and that conversation belongs at the front of the consultation.

And before any of that: what else lowers it

A low testosterone level in a man in his thirties is frequently not primary testicular failure. The Endocrine Society guideline is explicit that reversible and functional causes should be identified and addressed before treatment is considered. The usual suspects: excess weight, untreated obstructive sleep apnoea, heavy alcohol use, opioid medication, chronic illness, extreme training loads, and prior anabolic steroid use.

Which is why a competent workup asks about your sleep, your drinking and your training before it reaches for a prescription pad. If a clinic runs a panel, finds a low number and offers you therapy without asking any of that, you have learned something about the clinic. Our testosterone therapy guide goes through candidacy and monitoring in detail.

5. Hair loss — what works, and what is still unproven

Male pattern hair loss is the most common reason men under forty walk into a clinic like ours, so it deserves a straight answer about evidence tiers.

• Finasteride and minoxidil are the FDA-approved options, with decades of trial data behind them. Finasteride’s prescribing information records sexual adverse effects, and there is an ongoing and genuine debate about persistent symptoms after discontinuation. It is a real medication with real trade-offs, and it works.
• PRP for androgenetic alopecia is not FDA-approved for that use. The meta-analytic evidence — including a 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis — does show increased hair density, which is more than can be said for PRP in several other indications. But the preparations are not standardised and the trials are small. We describe it as elective and reasonably supported, not as established.
• Low-level laser devices are 510(k)-cleared, which is a different and lower regulatory bar than approval.

Our hair restoration guide has the numbers from the individual meta-analyses.

6. So what would we actually suggest before 40?

Where a clinic like ours genuinely adds something is on the follow-through rather than the testing — weight management that is actually supervised, sleep that gets investigated rather than tolerated, and hormone assessment when there are symptoms to explain. Where we add nothing is in ordering panels nobody recommends so that we have something to treat.

One honest gap in this article. Peptides and IV therapy are popular in this space, including with us. There is no guideline support for either as preventive health measures in healthy men, and we are not going to pretend otherwise in an article about evidence-based screening. They are separate conversations, on their own merits, and we have written about both elsewhere without the screening framing.

Where we do this

Men’s hormone panels and provider-led wellness programmes run across all six locations, with the largest men’s practice at Summerlin and West Los Angeles. The first appointment is a conversation and a history, not a panel — because which tests are worth running depends entirely on what you are actually describing.

Questions we get asked

Keep reading

• Testosterone therapy — candidacy, monitoring and expectations
• Men’s health at BHRC
• Hair restoration and PRP — what the evidence shows
• Advanced testing panels
• Medical weight management
• Longevity and wellness at BHRC
• Provider-led protocols and medical supervision

Book at any of our six locations

References

1. Movember — About us — Movember Foundation, causes and funding to date. movember.com
2. U.S. Preventive Services Task Force — Hypertension in adults: screening (Grade A). uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org
3. U.S. Preventive Services Task Force — Prediabetes and type 2 diabetes: screening (Grade B, adults 35–70 with overweight or obesity). uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org
4. U.S. Preventive Services Task Force — Statin use for the primary prevention of cardiovascular disease in adults: preventive medication. uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org
5. U.S. Preventive Services Task Force — Prostate cancer: screening (Grade C, men 55–69; Grade D, men 70 and older). uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org
6. U.S. Preventive Services Task Force — Testicular cancer: screening (Grade D). uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org
7. U.S. Preventive Services Task Force — Hepatitis C virus infection in adolescents and adults: screening (Grade B, adults 18–79). uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org
8. U.S. Preventive Services Task Force — Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection: screening (Grade A, ages 15–65). uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org
9. U.S. Preventive Services Task Force — Depression and suicide risk in adults: screening (Grade B for depression; Grade I for suicide risk). uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org
10. U.S. Preventive Services Task Force — Unhealthy alcohol use in adolescents and adults: screening and behavioral counseling interventions (Grade B, adults 18 and over). uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org
11. American Diabetes Association — Diagnosis and classification of diabetes: Standards of Care in Diabetes — 2025. Diabetes Care 2025;48(Suppl 1):S27–S49. diabetesjournals.org
12. American Heart Association — The AHA PREVENT online calculator — equations developed 2023, validated in over 6.5 million US adults aged 30–79. professional.heart.org
13. Bhasin S, Brito JP, Cunningham GR, et al. — Testosterone therapy in men with hypogonadism: an Endocrine Society clinical practice guideline. J Clin Endocrinol Metab 2018;103(5):1715–1744. academic.oup.com
14. American Urological Association — Evaluation and management of testosterone deficiency: AUA guideline. auanet.org
15. Lincoff AM, Bhasin S, Flevaris P, et al. — Cardiovascular safety of testosterone-replacement therapy (TRAVERSE). N Engl J Med 2023;389(2):107–117. nejm.org
16. U.S. Food and Drug Administration — FDA issues class-wide labeling changes for testosterone products, 28 February 2025. fda.gov
17. Liu PY, Swerdloff RS, Christenson PD, et al. — Rate, extent and modifiers of spermatogenic recovery after hormonal male contraception: an integrated analysis. Lancet 2006;367(9520):1412–1420. doi.org
18. Kieling L, Konzen AT, Zanella RK, Valente DS — Is autologous PRP capable of increasing hair density in androgenic alopecia? A systematic review and meta-analysis. An Bras Dermatol 2024;99(6):847–862. anaisdedermatologia.org.br
19. U.S. Food and Drug Administration — PROPECIA (finasteride) tablets prescribing information, NDA 020788. accessdata.fda.gov

Beverly Hills Rejuvenation Center. This content is for general education and does not create a physician-patient relationship or constitute medical advice. This article summarises published screening guidance and is not a personal screening plan. Which tests are appropriate for you depends on your history, your family history and your symptoms, and that is a conversation for a physician. Testosterone therapy is a prescription treatment with real trade-offs, including suppression of fertility. Platelet-rich plasma is not FDA-approved for hair loss. If you are struggling with your mental health, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available in the US by call or text at any time. Candidacy, dosing, results and pricing vary by person and are confirmed at a free consultation. Reviewed by the BHRC clinical team.