Health in Adolescent Girls

So let's talk a little bit about the biology of puberty.

Puberty really is a symphony of hormones, and it's orchestrated from signals from the brain to the ovaries.

These hormones not only shape our bodies, but they influence organs like the skin, the brain, and the uterus.

Hormones also drive the development of secondary sex characteristics, including breast development, body hair, voice changes, growth spurts.

And what we see here is there are signals from the brain, and that is labeled as GnRH and LH and FSH, and those hormones from the brain go through the bloodstream and travel down to the ovaries to interact and produce hormones such as estrogen and progesterone, as well as androgens.

We can see here that these hormones have a myriad of effects, including effects on mood, the menstrual cycle, and things like sebum or oil and acne production.

So again, thinking about how these hormones have these everyday effects in the body, we can think about androgens, and one androgen that we're all very well familiar with is testosterone.

There's another form of testosterone as well called DHT or dihydrotestosterone, and these androgens activate what are called sebaceous glands or oil glands within the skin, and that affects oil production, which is one of the key components to ac-acne production.

We also see hormones, what we call cyclic hormones, in thinking about the menstrual cycle, so estrogen and progesterone, and think about how those regulate the menstrual cycle and that how the, these hormones can affect mood and fluid changes.

And what we'll touch on when we touch on PMS is how estrogen and progesterone, how these hormone changes, how they change throughout the cycle, and how that really contributes to the development, um, and the symptoms of PMS.