Hormones play a crucial role in women’s health, so the hormonal imbalance can impact all aspects of a woman’s health and living.
The focus on female hormones often centers around reproduction and fertility, and how the female sex hormones estrogen and progesterone impact reproductive health.
While important, there are other hormones that play a crucial role in women’s health and hormonal imbalance can impact all aspects of a woman’s health, not just fertility.
We take a look at the role of female hormones in the body, the causes and symptoms of female hormone imbalance, and how lifestyle and diet can impact hormone health.
What’s the role of female hormones?
Hormones are internal chemical messengers which play a crucial role in our bodies by acting on our DNA to direct the various cells in our body to produce specific proteins.
Hormones are produced by endocrine glands which are distributed throughout the body and include the control hypothalamus and pituitary glands together with the endocrine glands producing response hormones including thyroid and parathyroid glands, gonads (ovaries or testes), and adrenal glands, to name a few. Hormones produced by these endocrine glands travel in the bloodstream to their target cells in tissues and organs disturbed throughout the body.
A single hormone has far-reaching effects throughout the body. For example, there are receptors for the female hormone estrogen not only in the female reproductive tract, but also in bone, gut, cardiovascular system, and brain. In this way, a particular hormone can have far-reaching effects on many biological systems in the body.
Furthermore, hormones interact which each other, forming a complex network. For example, the production of all hormones is regulated through a series of feedback loops. In many cases, this feedback loop is via the major control center for hormone regulation: the hypothalamus-pituitary axis in the brain. There are also interactions between the response hormones themselves such as cortisol (stress response hormone) and thyroid hormones.
The infographic below lists the key hormones essential to health and wellbeing.
What do hormones have to do with women’s health?
Although the complexity of the hormone networks is fascinating, what has this got to do with health in practical terms?
The World Health Organisation defines health as not just an absence of disease, rather positive physical, mental, and social wellbeing.
As there are receptors for hormones throughout the body, they play a vital role in optimizing all aspects of health and performance. Furthermore, the pattern of hormone production changes throughout a woman’s life, so this impacts health not just today, but how our health evolves over our entire life.
How do hormones change as women age?
From the age, a woman reaches puberty to around her mid-30s hormone levels are stable and fluctuate naturally each month in line with the menstrual cycle. Periods will be regular in women with a healthy hormone balance unless a woman is on some form of the contraceptive pill.
As a woman enters her early to mid-40s her ovaries will start to become less responsive, resulting in the start of perimenopause where estrogen and progesterone levels fluctuate more, and periods become less regular.
Estrogen and progesterone levels gradually decline during perimenopause and FSH and LH levels increase. These changes cause a hormone imbalance resulting in menopause symptoms such as irregular periods, mood changes, hot flushes, and loss of libido.
The transition from menopause to post-menopause occurs after a woman has not had a period for at least 12 months. Oestrogen, progesterone, and testosterone drop to very low levels. Declining estrogen levels can lead to longer-term health issues such as cardiovascular disease and osteoporosis.
What causes a female hormone imbalance?
A regular menstrual cycle is a good sign of a healthy, balanced endocrine system. Any changes in a woman’s period outside of pregnancy, menopause, or the use of contraception should be investigated as it could be a sign of hormone imbalance.
A hormone imbalance may be caused by endocrine gland dysfunction or other factors such as lifestyle – poor diet, stress, lack of sleep, or over-exercising.
As hormones play a key role in regulating different processes in the body, an imbalance can cause a variety of symptoms. It can also be a sign of an underlying health condition, particularly in women who are not experiencing a lack of ovarian response due to menopause.
How your lifestyle can impact your hormone health?
As hormones are so crucial to your health, throughout your life, how can you balance your hormones and ensure that they are in top form?
Making informed lifestyle choices will support your hormone health. This can be achieved by effectively harnessing your hormones through behaviors.
The three-key lifestyle behaviors under your control are the triad of exercise, nutrition, and recovery. An optimal balance of all these factors will favor healthy hormones and therefore all elements of physical mental and social health.
The chart below shows how a balanced lifestyle that includes exercise, with enough nutrition to support the energy your body is using, combined with plenty of rest/recovery (particularly if you do a lot of exercise and high-intensity exercise), will ensure your hormones balanced.
Where you run the risk of a hormonal imbalance is not having the right level of nutrition to support the energy your body is expelling through exercise and day-to-day living, combined with low recovery periods or lack of rest. Here, even non-athletes can suffer from what’s called RED-S (relative energy deficiency in sport).
This can lead to your body shutting down non-essential functions in order to preserve energy for vital functions such as keeping your heart beating and lungs functioning. In women, this can result in their periods becoming irregular or stopping altogether.
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