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Health and medicine
Course: Health and medicine > Unit 1
Lesson 8: Reproductive system introduction- Welcome to the reproductive system
- Anatomy of the male reproductive system
- Transport of sperm via erection and ejaculation
- Spermatogenesis
- Testosterone
- Basics of egg development
- The ovarian cycle
- Meet the placenta!
- Reproductive cycle graph - Follicular phase
- Reproductive cycle graph - Luteal phase
- Estrogen
- Breast anatomy and lactation
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Estrogen
Created by Vishal Punwani.
Want to join the conversation?
- Did he say that girls have a better chance of getting osteoporosis cause of higher estrogen levels? It sounded like it to me, and I was just wondering.(2 votes)
- wait in this video he mentioned estrogen is being produced as a result of FSH secretion from posterior pituitary but in previous videos he said that LH effects on theca cells results in production of androstenedione which leads to granulosa cells producing estrogen. So which one is it? Both are contributing or it is one over the other in estrogen production?(1 vote)
- Almost correct - except FSH does not act on thecal cells (they lack the appropriate receptors), it acts on the granulosa cells. Lutenizing hormone (LH) is the hormone, also released by the anterior pituitary gland, which stimulates thecal cells to produce androstendione.
So to answer the original question, it is the combined effect of these two tropic hormones to cause production of estrogen in the ovaries.(2 votes)
- what are the labias used for(1 vote)
- Lipoproteins aren't molecules, are they? They're more like conglomerations of fatty acids and cholesterol, and some proteins? 5:24(1 vote)
- where does the functions of progesterone and estrogen come in on khanacademy? I want to know the roles of these as sex hormones...i.e, secondary sexual characteristics, role in implantation,etc(1 vote)
- Everything you mentioned were positive things about estrogen. Is it possible to be in excess of estrogen and what would that do to your body. Sign and symptoms ?(1 vote)
- I know that in some cases of breast cancer, too much estrogen is linked to an over growth of breast tissue which caused lumps and over proliferation of the tissue. Also seen in men with excess estrogen they get excess breast tissue (gynecomastia)(1 vote)
- what make the ooctye to proceed in meiosis ?(1 vote)
- , do estrogen and testosterone bind to DNA with DNA-binding proteins or just by themselves (the latter is implied in the video). 2:38(1 vote)
- There are almost always other DNA binding proteins involved in steroid responses. This allows a better regulation of the responses, that by using only the hormones.(1 vote)
- would it be plausible to give women who just went through menopause estrogen, since they have low levels and this could lead to some negative affects?(1 vote)
- What good does LDL do for us? also it says that estrogen saves bones from breaking down as fast in women, is that the same in men?(1 vote)
- LDL carries cholesterol from the liver to cells. Essential for getting that cholesterol to various cells for building cell membranes.
Men have testosterone instead (with no huge decline later in life) for maintaining bone mass.(1 vote)
Video transcript
- Let's talk about one of the major female sex hormones, Estrogen. And before we officially start, I should mention that even though I said estrogen is one of the
major female sex hormones, I just want to be clear
here that males also produce and need a bit of estrogen as well, but we just produce
sort of a small fraction of what female's need and produce. So let's take a look. Estrogen is produced in females
primarily by the ovaries, and as sort of a bonus,
when she's pregnant, her placenta also produces
some estrogen as well. There's also a little bit
made by the adrenal glands that sit on top of the kidneys, the breasts, and by fat cells in general, but we'll sort of keep
our focus on the ovaries as the primary source for now. So, the Anterior Pituitary hormone called follicle stimulating
hormone, or FSH, causes follicles in
the ovaries to develop, and when follicles in the ovaries develop, two groups of cells within them called Theca cells and Granulosa cells start to sort of team
up and release estrogen into the bloodstream, and
the amount sort of goes up and down throughout each month and that's because of signals from the Hypothalamus and
the Anterior Pituitary. So, now we know where we get most of the estrogen in the body, and we know that its levels are regulated by interactions between
the brain and the ovaries, but before we talk about what it does from a biological standpoint, I want to go over how
estrogen actually works. So after estrogen is made in the ovaries by these Granulosa cells, it's transported to other places in the
body by the bloodstream. And so I'll just draw
little red blood cells here, and then I'll draw estrogen
in light purple here. And these blood vessels take the estrogen all over the body so it can carry out all of its biological functions, but once it gets to its target, what exactly happens? How exactly does it work? So to show you this, I'll blow up a cell here in the thigh, and let's say that this
here is the cell membrane, and this purply-blue thing here is the blood vessel that's sort of lining or running beside that cell. So we'll draw in our red blood cells and our estrogen. So when estrogen sees a
cell that it wants to enter, it crosses the cell membrane, where it's picked up by a carrier protein, and I'll draw that as a taxi because all it's really
doing it picking up estrogen and transporting it to its
next destination in the cell, which is the nucleus, and the nucleus is where our DNA is. And so estrogen works by
binding near to certain genes to change their expression, and so that'll ultimately change the behavior of that target cell. So that's how it works, but what exactly does it do in the body? What sort of effect does
it have on a person's body? And I purposely say a person's body here to remind you that males and females sort of depend on estrogen
to do different things in our respective bodies. So, for example, in males specifically, estrogen has a role in
the maturation of sperm, and is stored to sorta
pair up with testosterone to increase libido, also
known as the sex drive. But estrogen does a lot
of female-specific stuff. It actually has a lot
to do with the growth and the development of the
female reproductive tract. So for one, we know that it stimulates the growth of the ovaries and the follicles inside the ovaries as part of the reproductive cycle. It also causes growth of
the smooth muscle components of the female reproductive tract. For example, the smooth
muscle in the uterus and the uterine tubes after puberty. It also stimulates the
growth of the female's external genitalia and breasts during puberty as well, and the way it sort of
manages breast growth is by primarily increasing the fat that gets deposited in the breasts. And speaking of fat deposition, estrogen's also responsible
for the so-called female fat distribution pattern, which is deposition on the
hips as well as the breasts, in contrast to the male pattern, which is fat distribution
around the tummy. So those are the major effects that estrogen has on
the reproductive tract and on that fat distribution role. There are some other really important non-reproductive roles
that estrogen has as well, and we'll touch on two of those. So number one, estrogen
does some really good things for your blood cholesterol levels, and for you to really
appreciate this point, I kind of have to tell you a bit about cholesterol first. So, bear with me for a minute, and let's have a quick
chat about cholesterol. So cholesterol is a lipid molecule that, despite all the
negative press it receives, it's kind of essential for life. It's required to make nice,
healthy cell membranes, and, maybe a bit ironically, we make a lot of our
hormones out of cholesterol, and in fact our testosterone and estrogen themselves are made from cholesterol. Our cholesterol has to be
carried around our bodies in the bloodstream, and essentially, we have a
couple types of molecules that carry the cholesterol around. So we have one molecule called HDL, or high-density lipoprotein, and we have another molecule called LDL, or low-density lipoprotein. And all that density
business in their names just refers to the ratio
of protein to cholesterol that these molecules have in them. So, for example, HDL has lots of protein and a little bit of cholesterol. So it's high-density in
terms of its protein content, but for simplicity sake,
we'll just call them good cholesterol, being the HDL, and bad cholesterol, being the LDL, and the reason they're differentiated as being "good and bad" is because high levels
of the bad kind, LDL, is implicated in causing
problems with your blood vessels, which can lead to things like
heart attacks or strokes, and optimum levels of the good kind, HDL, is correlated with reduced risk of having these bad things happen. So, back to estrogen. Estrogen actually reduces
the bad cholesterol, LDL, and increases the good cholesterol, HDL. So that's pretty great. Kind of a lot of cholesterol background to make that point, but it's physiologically a
really important role of estrogen and, in fact, after a
female slows her production of estrogen in her fifties, her level of HDL can
actually start to go down. So that's estrogen and cholesterol. Another really important estrogen role is one that has to do with
preserving the strength of our bones in our skeletal system. So, throughout our lives, bones are constantly
undergoing renovations, and that sounds a bit weird, right, because we always tend to think of bones as being these static unchanging things, but actually on a microscopic level, they're constantly being broken down and built back up, and estrogen actually
affects part of that process. So estrogen slows down the cells that are involved with
the breakdown portion of your bone renovations. So as a result of that, your skeleton stays more dense for a longer period of time, and that means that as
estrogen levels get lower when a female gets older, she's more at risk for
developing a bone condition where the bones get brittle and weak, and that's called osteoporosis. So that's a little overview
of the importance of estrogen and a few of its biological
roles within the body.