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Men, Women, and Stories We Tell About Hormones and PMS

Sat, 2008-02-23 00:36 — figleaf


Image appears on Wikipedia’s “Menstrual Cycle”
page. Used under a Creative Commons license.

So we were studying the menstural cycle last week in my integrated interpersonal communications theory / women’s studies / sex education class. One lecture that was pretty cool was on the pretty intricate, interdependent dance between Follicle-Stimulating Hormone, Estradol, Luteinizing Hormone, and Progesterone over the course of an average of 29.5 days. What’s cool is that often one hormone will block secretion of another until another moves past a certain threshold, permitting the first one to spike, or yet another hormone will signal another hormone-secreting area to continue secreting it’s hormone till yet another event says do something else. It’s actually more technical, and more precise, and cooler than that, but at this point, anyway, Wikipedia or other sources are still a more reliable source than I’d be.

One thing our professor did mention: if you look at the enclosed graph, over around the right hand side, roughly marked by days 22-28 — the time most women who experience PMS report, well, experiencing it — all the various hormone levels aren’t going up they’re going down! She said “so when you hear that PMS is all about ‘excess’ female hormones the answer’s actually quite the opposite.”

Now we could just stop there and goggle about that for a minute but I’d like to mention the connection that popped into my little brain as soon as she pointed that low-hormone tidbit: various studies (plus the personal experience of several friends who use their own hormone supplements) much of the distemper and violence traditionally associated with testosterone in men is also more correctly attributed to reduced levels of the hormone!

So! Men who lash out after experiencing a severe loss of “face?” Lowering levels of testosterone. Cranky old men? Declining levels of testosterone. And now I’m hearing about something similar when women are experiencing declining levels of… oh, and while I’m thinking about it there’s also that big plummetting post-partum drop in progesterone that’s blamed for all manner of problems from headaches to depression. (Too lazy to Google citations for any of that, but citations there are.)

Anyway, point being that to the extent it’s a misconception that “sex” hormones cause emotional problems, and to the extent it’s a misconception that “sex” hormones cause emotional problems specific to each gender rather than declines in both those hormones causing… not quite identical but certainly suspiciously similar problems in both genders…

Well, to the extent any of that’s true… and I’m really only saying it could be… maybe we’re more alike than different.

Sat, 2008-02-23 07:04 — 1960 (not verified) #permalink

You know, this helps make more sense of why my mother was so darn cantankerous right after her hysterectomy. I thought she just hated being helpless in the hospital, but then, it was pretty much the same thing she does at home anyway, and I couldn’t figure out the real reason why.

[Hi Jha. Well, she probably also did hate being hospitalized — hysterectomies are hard-core surgery requiring months of recovery. But yeah, a lot of people call it instant menopause and that’s pretty rough. It’s less talked about but there’s similar hormonal shock, incidentally, for loss of testicles in men as well. —fl]

Sat, 2008-02-23 08:45 — 1960 (not verified) #permalink

There is an interesting book called The Female Brain by Louann Brizendine. The book discusses the effect that hormones have on the brain. Females were selected mainly because we have so many more hormones at play in our body during any given month.

Brizendine uses teens as examples in her book because of the huge mood swings they go through but it gets her point across. The constant fluctuation of hormones in the female body (or, as she calls it, the bathing of the brain), really throws us for a loop when those peaks and valleys start sloshing around.

[Hi norby! Just one of the reasons Brizendine’s book has been debunked is the idea that women’s behavior is explained by monthly hormone sloshing while equally severe daily hormone sloshing in men’s bodies are supposed to leave us steady on course. Another reason is that virtually all her citations don’t say what she claims they say and therefore her conclusions are, um, made up. And all that’s not to say there are no differences, just that they’re not as one-way or clear cut… or as inevitable results-wise as traditionalists like Brizendine would have us believe. —fl]

Sat, 2008-02-23 10:23 — 1960 (not verified) #permalink

That graph is terrific. I’ve always had a hard time wrapping my brain around the cyclical changes, and the visual really helps.

More weird and counter-“intuitive” testosterone facts: Men on testosterone blockers to treat advanced prostate cancer are notorious for being verbally nasty toward their spouses – and it correlates with starting the hormone treatment, not just with the fact that they’re seriously ill (which of course they have every right to be angry about).

Testosterone actually rises in the wake of an aggressive act. So contrary to the widespread idea that increased T. causes aggression, at least within normal physiological limits the reverse seems to be true.

There’s a great study where researchers let five monkeys sort themselves into a hierarchy and then injected the middle monkey with a megadose of T. Monkey #3 became more aggressive toward the two below him in the food chain – but even more of a kiss-ass toward the two above him. All of which suggests that T. is more important in amplifying aggression than in creating it de novo.

This stuff is all so much more complicated than people think – and nowhere close to fully understood scientifically – which opens the door wide to people projecting all their sterotypes and prejudices onto hormones.

[Hi Sungold. Yup, waaay more complicated… and not so much helped with people confuse cause and effect, as in “men are aggressive, men have testosterone, therefore testosterone causes aggression.” There’s also the tricky little tidbit I heard from an author who’s been interviewing scads of endocrinologists, many of whom say estrogen (...or is it progesterone? can’t remember…) and testosterone are structurally different but may be nearly interchangable at the cellular/functional level. I’d want to hear it from a peer-reviewed horse’s mouth first, but I’d be tickled pink if it turned out to be true. —fl]

Sun, 2008-02-24 12:03 — 1960 (not verified) #permalink

Well, I’m neither peer reviewed nor (thankfully!) a horse, and the very reason I’ve been thinking about hormones lately is that I’m a bit of a numbskull about endocrinology but trying hard to improve myself. :-)

That said, I’m pretty sure that you’re thinking about estrogen and testosterone. During prenatal development, testosterone gets converted into estrogen before it passes into the brain. This obviously raises questions about how T. can “masculinize” the brain prenatally. And yet the evidence is pretty solid that sex hormones matter in brain development – for instance, people with androgen insensitivity syndrome are XY genetically but look like women and generally feel themselves to be women.

Have you ever taken a look at Natalie Angier’s Woman: An Intimate Geography? I love that book and I think you would too. It has a great discussion of sex hormones. (Plus she debunks ev psych quite entertainingly.) Robert Sapolsky is also great on this stuff, accessible and funny.

[Actually I’ve got my eyes peeled for Angier’s book but haven’t seen in in my local box bookstore. Also yes, thank you, estrogen sounds about right. I really should have been paying more attention but then I thought my acquaintance would have published about either the success or failure of her investigation — since it’s a great story either way I wonder what she’s doing instead. Anyway, while you’re not peer reviewed if you’ve looked at all lately then you’re a better source than I. Thanks, Sungold. —fl]

Tue, 2008-02-26 20:19 — 1960 (not verified) #permalink

I learned that PMS is caused by a drop of hormones when I started taking hormonal birth control for the first time in 10 years. I am taking slightly more than what my body actually needs and PMS decreased (because the hormones rarely drop to such a level).

I also noticed it when in trying to correct a hormone buildup in my system. I had killer PMS when my hormones dropped to the level they would normally be at just before menstruation without birth control.

[Interesting, Christina. Thanks for putting it into personal perspective. —fl]

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