Health and Hormones

When something goes awry with your health, hormones may be the last thing that you or your doctor consider when trying to determine the culprit. To determine the best treatment plan to make you comfortable and restore your good health, it's important to realize that hormones can be the cause of many ailments. Though hormones have been most commonly associated with problems pertaining to the reproductive systems or menopause, today scientists are learning that they play a much bigger role in both creating and maintaining good health.

At their most obvious, hormones are responsible for initiating the development of secondary sex characteristics in both males and females. The word "hormone" often becomes a household term when kids enter adolescence; "raging hormones" cause teens' faces to break out in uncontrollable acne and teens to become overwhelmed by a wide range of emotions. Hormones are well known for wreaking havoc on the emotional stability of perfectly normal children who suddenly become monsters when their bodies begin to change.

When women reach late middle age, they go through another "change" that is often equally as disturbing as what happens to kids when they enter adolescence. Menopause brings with it a host of inconvenient and difficult symptoms that women struggle to overcome. Most people are familiar with these hormonal "problems", but don't realize that hormones do more than initiate adolescence and menopause.

A less known fact about hormonal balance is that they can diminish the inflammation in the body that can lead to a number of fairly serious diseases like arthritis, atherosclerosis, Alzheimer's, osteoporosis, depression and more. Many of the diseases that doctors and scientists once thought had underlying genetic or neurological causes are actually sometimes triggered by chronically imbalanced hormone levels. Low-level inflammation at the molecular level can cause a number of issues in the body that are potentially devastating to one's health. Many people simply don't realize that cardiovascular problems can be the result of imbalance hormones or that arthritis can similarly be exacerbated by chronically having hormones that are either too high or too low. It's surprising to a lot of people to learn that hormone levels can play a role in the onset of Alzheimer's disease and depression because we've learned to believe that these diseases have a strictly neurological basis.

If you have been trying to figure out how to treat an inflammatory disease more effectively, you might want to take a closer look at hormone replacement therapies to bring hormones into a harmonic balance. Hormones are more important than you may have realized. Achieving hormone balance can often restore good health when nothing else works.