Health in Adolescent Girls

So let's touch on the realities of teen health.

About 85% or up to 85% of teens will experience acne at some point.

And PMS, premenstrual syndrome, affects up to 40% of menstruating teens.

We'll touch on what that means in terms of physical symptoms, but these issues really can impact kids and teens in multiple ways, including confidence, mood, and social wellbeing.

So this talk really isn't just about skin or periods, it's about quality of life.

We will be covering what's happening hormonally and touching on some of the physiology that happens as kids move into puberty and adolescence, why acne and PMS occur, where conventional treatments help, and where we might want to explore and lean in a little bit on things like nutrition supplements and other integrative approaches.

So let's talk a little bit about the biology

of puberty.

Purity 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 acne production.

We also see hormones, what we call cyclic hormones, thinking about the menstrual cycle, estrogen and progesterone, and think about how those regulate the menstrual cycle and how 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 and the symptoms of PMS.

So what I wanna touch on a little bit as well in terms of thinking about the physiology what we see manifesting with two common conditions, the two common conditions of acne and PMS are very common things that we think about and we talk about in a clinical context.