Reproductive Hormones and What They Do
I’ve been in the pelvic health world for some time now, and I’ve noticed in recent years that perimenopause and menopause have found themselves in the spotlight, all for good reason. Many people do not know what happens with this hormonal shift, and it is difficult to figure it out on our own. When we go through puberty, we are taught in school’s sex education class (if we’re lucky enough to have one) about what we will experience with puberty’s hormonal shift, whilst keeping in mind that only 26 states require medically accurate information. So if attaining information about our bodies is difficult at a time when we’re gathered to learn this information, what happens in midlife when there’s nowhere to turn to keep informed? What happens when you need to hunt down a menopause specialist, who is strangely hard to find, to receive proper care?
Helping the community to keep informed is something that we at The Pelvic Model are working hard to combat. We know how challenging it is to find reliable pelvic health information. Because of this, we’re hosting workshops at our clinic featuring crucial health topics and activities from trusted local providers. We’re committed to educating the public with pertinent information about our bodies. To start this off with a bang, we’re launching events in the crucial months of perimenopause and menopause awareness months.
Without further ado, let’s talk about hormones in our reproductive years and how things change in midlife.
Reproductive hormones:
Reproductive hormones are such a massive topic, and there’s so much to talk about! To keep it short, let’s focus on five hormones that you’d probably want to know about concerning perimenopause and menopause: estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, insulin, and cortisol.
Did you know that there are estrogen receptors in every cell in females’ bodies? This is how crucial this hormone is. Because it is in every cell, it is vital for all bodily functions. For instance, estrogen plays an essential role in brain function and holding memories. It plays a crucial role in your cardiovascular health, and it protects your heart. It has an indispensable role in bone density. It helps stimulate your menstrual cycle, keep the vaginal walls healthy and happy, and much more.
As a musculoskeletal specialist, I want to inform you that, in addition to testosterone, estrogen also plays a role in building muscle and strength. This means that in reproductive years, overtraining to the point of amenorrhea can be detrimental to one’s health and athletic performance.
Progesterone is here for gestation and pregnancy. Prior to ovulation, estrogen thickens the uterine lining. After you ovulate, progesterone helps create a nutrient-rich lining and supports vascular changes that make implantation possible. If you become pregnant, it provides blood vessels in the endometrium to help the fetus grow. If you don’t get pregnant, progesterone levels will decrease in the body, leading to a bleed. This hormone is crucial to know regarding perimenopause – details in the next blog.
If you’ve been here for a while, you’ve probably heard me talk about the importance of androgens and testosterone's role in pelvic health. The vestibule has many androgen receptors, and if it is lacking, it can lead to vestibular pain as well as urinary dysfunction. However, testosterone supports more than just the pelvis. It plays a crucial role in cognitive function, sex drive, and bone health. When testosterone is too low, you may experience things like pain with sexual activity, low sex drive, brain fog, or osteoporosis. All things that are vital to health and feeling good.
**Fun fact: Did you know that females have more testosterone in their bodies than they do estrogen?
It may be confusing as to why we’re talking about insulin regarding our hormones. However, insulin is a vital part of health and well-being in all stages of life. In reproductive years, it is imperative to pay attention to insulin because it can be a driver of increased androgens, leading to PCOS. This can contribute to irregular and missing periods, excessive hair growth, acne, and infertility. Further, insulin resistance can lead to prediabetes and even type 2 diabetes. If this is not concerning to you, remember what we said about missing periods in the estrogen section? Keeping insulin in check goes hand in hand with overall health and for more reasons than just diabetes.
Cortisol is the final hormone that we’ll talk about. You may know this as the “stress hormone.” On the topic of PCOS, cortisol can be a player in insulin resistance, whilst interacting with adrenal hormones, thus making hormone imbalance more severe. In overtrained athletes, cortisol can signal your body to believe it is not safe for pregnancy, leading to amenorrhea and, therefore, other health issues. Further, abdominal fat has four times as many cortisol receptors as anywhere in the body, which can contribute to increased belly fat. Plus, it contributes to hormones that make you hungrier and crave more sweets and fats. As we will learn in the perimenopause blog, it is important to make healthy life choices in midlife to set you up for success in menopause.
Now that we understand these hormones:
Understanding what your hormones are doing in your reproductive years is crucial because it’s the foundation of knowing what is happening to your body in perimenopause and menopause. I hope you found this hormone dictionary helpful! We’ll see you in part 2 of this series.
