Estrogen (specifically Estradiol, E2) is one of the most important systemic hormones in both men and women
I've spent a significant amount of my free time for the last 15 years studying androgen physiology and self-experimentation.
Here are a few facts about estradiol that others might find surprising:
1. E2 acts as a master metabolic/energy regulator in humans. ER-alpha and pan-ER agonists are being developed for obesity and metabolic disorders. Example: SLU-PP-332
2. Libido in males is regulated by E2. Androgens like testosterone/DHT seem to be required to support the biology of erectile function, but for mental libido estrogen is the primary component.
3. Estradiol is synergistically anabolic with androgens. This is why cattle hormone implants contain a blend of Trenbolone and E2
Estrogen has so many supporting functions in brain, muscle, adipose tissue, and bone health...
Apologies for no citations and rough formatting but currently on a phone. Happy to provide citations when home
Estrogen becomes a real problem for people experimenting with anabolic steroids or even taking some of the TRT regimens which go past replacement doses and into performance enhancing territory.
Testosterone is converted into estradiol by aromatase, so people who boost their testosterone up to high levels get more estradiol as a result.
As an aside: Aromatase is present in body fat, so higher body fat will produce more sites for testosterone to convert to estradiol. This is one reason why higher body fat is correlated with lower testosterone. It’s also one reason why the decline of testosterone levels are correlated with the rise of obesity and you shouldn’t trust anyone who rants about declining testosterone levels without acknowledging that major correlation.
Back on topic: The increased estradiol production from excess testosterone can go above the normal range in men, which can cause a wide range of mental and physical problems. It can even promote growth of breast tissue that when left unchecked needs to be surgically removed later. Surgeons who deal with gynecomastia are seeing booming business right now due to all of the men going to TRT clinics and getting blasted with crazy doses of testosterone.
There are medications which reduce aromatase activity but they are very hard to get right. It’s a common story for men to suffer from excess estradiol after manipulating their testosterone, so they assume they can fix it with an aromatase inhibitor. They take slightly too much (which is very easy due to the dosing and duration of action) and crash their estradiol levels too low. Between the sudden swing in levels and the low level they can find themselves feeling a different kind of terrible. Someone I know become suicidal after taking an aromatase inhibitor at the ‘normal’ recommending broscience dosage. It took weeks to clear due to the dynamics of how everything returns to equilibrium. Very scary time.
Estradiol is highly active in the brain including regulation of key functions like MAO (the enzyme inhibited by MAOI antidepressants). One of many reasons why out-of-range levels or sudden fluctuations can make people feel bad in various ways.
Re #2, in the mtf trans experience high estrogen and low testosterone are correlated with low libido, with some individuals even temporarily stopping antiandrogen medications in order to get some back
Yeah, your comment squares with (and the GP's point #2 contradicts) what I learned in my college Science & Gender class, which was a combined neuroscience/psychology offering where we read a bunch of papers. Most of them supported that testosterone was the primary driver of libido in both men and women, with higher T levels corresponding to higher sexual desire and lower T levels corresponding to the opposite.
The damage the Women’s Health Initiative did to women’s health by conducting the flawed research that got HRT black boxed for twenty years really cannot be overstated. We went from a quarter of women being on estrogen replacement therapy post-menopause at the turn of the millennium to ~5% in 2020. A real case study in institutional failure.
> Nearly two-thirds of Americans with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) are women, but the reasons why women are more vulnerable are still not fully understood. Scientists have long theorized that the loss of estrogen after menopause may reduce the brain’s natural protection against memory loss and neurodegeneration.
The part that makes no sense for me is men ending with smaller rates of dementia, given they had much less estrogen to begin with. Men have less incidence of dementia. Men also have much lager incidence of baldness. Did somebody already study if baldness and dementia are inversely correlated? I don't know, perhaps sunlight exposure in the scalp have neuroprotective effects?
Given the prevalence of baldness, and the downside of the condition for sexual attractiveness of its bearers, I suspect we will still discover some strong unexpected upside to explain why this trait was selected for regardless.
> baldness, and the downside of the condition for sexual attractiveness of its bearers
Just a guess, and I highly doubt there are any reliable statistics on this, but perhaps balding men are less likely to be tempted to abandon their family unit, thereby making it more likely that their children will thrive and carry on their genes?
I base this theory on my own experience, which is that I went completely bald in my early thirties and haven't had a second look from a woman ever since. Even if I were the sort to want to cheat on my wife, there wouldn't be any takers![0]
[0] I'm not claiming that bald men are necessarily sexually unattractive. I just know that it didn't work for me, looks-wise.
Just chiming in for anyone else reading this and worried about their hair thinning, this is a thing men worry about much more than women. Bruce Willis, Patrick Stewart, Michael Jordan, Vin Diesel - there have been plenty of bald sex symbols and plenty of women who enjoy that look (and the look of many average men of various builds and ages)
The factors of attractiveness are by far more related to basic self care (hygine and being fit enough to care for yourself and others), kindness and the ability to share in others' joy, and passionate interest in something, and a lightness or humor in your manner.
I started balding at 18, shaved it all at 22. Its not an issue. Height, hair, etc might get immediate reaction and attention, but hardly matter for real connections.
I just want to add that I wholeheartedly agree with this, and I would hate for anyone who's losing their hair to conclude that it's the end of the road for their love life.
Good grooming, a good sense of humor, and most importantly, generally being a good person, are what really matter.
This seems like an odd conclusion to draw. I'm married with a full head of hair and I couldn't tell you whether or not any woman has ever been interested because I'm not paying attention nor am I trying to draw it.
Good for you. I always did notice if there was a spark between me and someone I encountered. I wasn't going to act on it if I was already in a relationship, but I found it nice to feel that I had some physical appeal.
Just anedoctal evidence, but I have a group of older coworkers, most in late 40s-early 50s, all divorced, and by their reports on their attempts at getting back at dating, success pretty much track how much hair is left. That made me a bit upset, as I'm slowly getting bald myself.
there is a huge difference between balding and bald
nobody wants to see a guy in denial clinging onto something, lean in fully
and yes it is unfortunate that different people are attracted to the bald variant than the ones you already know, but you gotta show resolve and confidence
> Nearly two-thirds of Americans with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) are women, but the reasons why women are more vulnerable are still not fully understood.
Women live much longer and more comfortable lives. Men are more likely to die before alzheimer can even manifest.
US life expectancy in 2024 for women was 81.4 years; for men, 76.5 [1]; “non-early” symptoms of Alzheimer's typically begin after 65 [2]. I don’t think that the life expectancy average offset of ~5 years is the main factor here.
Also compare retirement ages, years worked, income (hard mental work)... it is well known that alzhaimer is corellated with brain activity (like solving suduku puzzles). Watching tv all day is not very healthy for brain...
Yes, I didn’t address that portion of your original post, as I was silently agreeing with you that men perform vital social and economic activity such as pick-up truck, football, and bitcoin, whereas women do nothing all day save for frivolous non-labor activities such as raising children.
Well, I went out to disprove your thesis, thinking we can easily look at countries where men live longer than women in another country.
For example, women in the US have a lower life expectancy than men in Australia (go figure). Now women are less than 1.4 times more likely than men to get dementia in australia, but about 2 times more likely to get alzheimer in the US. So that kind of points in your direction, but that is of course wildly inaccurate, cause one is mentioning dementia the other only alzheimer and whatnot.
Memory is environment-associated. Which is to say, these memories that you have are connected to the environment that you find yourself in. Change your environment and your memory, to a degree proportional to the environment change, breaks.
This is why sometimes you enter a room and forget why you came in.
This can explain the phenomenon referred to in the op. A woman enters a room devoid of estrogen and her memory breaks.
All of the claims above wrt memory reads quite mundane and adequately non assertive, but I'm a layperson.
I do believe it's well established that memory is associative. It's why roses are associated with love, because of Valentine's Day. If you see roses or smell roses, you will recall memories of your loved ones maybe, especially if you have given them roses.
Whether the decline in estrogen content of a room can be the dominant mechanism for momentary memory loss is a separate claim and more dubious sounding to me though (estrogen behaving like a pheromone??), but it's not like I have looked into this deeply so idk.
The article keeps bouncing between talking about estrogen loss generally, and the extracellular matrix (ECM), and doesn't connect the two until about halfway through the article where it says estrogen loss was studied in the ECM... but then it goes back to talking about stuff unrelated to the ECM.
I thought "production" might be the key word here, but that's barely mentioned in the article either.
1. Memory and social issues: old, female, either stoppage
2. Depression: either age, female, either stoppage
3. ECM changes: either age, either sex, reduced brain estrogen (whole body not tested?)
The article says:
> In mice, ... in females [estrogen] is produced predominantly in the brain.
But the paper says:
> In rodents, aromatase is expressed almost exclusively in the brain and gonads (Bulun et al. 2005; Zhao et al. 2009). Old female mice are thus heavily reliant on estrogen synthesis in the brain after the cessation of estrous cycles (equivalent to menopause in women).
IIUC in humans it's not produced in the brain, so the idea was to replicate that in mice artificially and see what affect it has on brain function. And... it led to decline in memory function in mice.
So I guess we're back to my first question, which is how was this commonly known if this is a new study drawing that link.
TLDR though I think the conclusion isn't that we've established a link, but that we've confirmed there's some other female-male difference that allows estrogen to have this effect.
Edit: no, I'm still confused. The paper concludes:
> Furthermore, brain-specific estrogen deficiency, achieved through targeted deletion of aromatase, led to alterations in hippocampal ECM that correlated with behavioral changes and memory impairment
This is wrong, right? Alterations to ECM happened in males and females, but the behavioral changes and memory impairment were in women only...
Estrogen (specifically Estradiol, E2) is one of the most important systemic hormones in both men and women
I've spent a significant amount of my free time for the last 15 years studying androgen physiology and self-experimentation.
Here are a few facts about estradiol that others might find surprising:
1. E2 acts as a master metabolic/energy regulator in humans. ER-alpha and pan-ER agonists are being developed for obesity and metabolic disorders. Example: SLU-PP-332
2. Libido in males is regulated by E2. Androgens like testosterone/DHT seem to be required to support the biology of erectile function, but for mental libido estrogen is the primary component.
3. Estradiol is synergistically anabolic with androgens. This is why cattle hormone implants contain a blend of Trenbolone and E2
Estrogen has so many supporting functions in brain, muscle, adipose tissue, and bone health...
Apologies for no citations and rough formatting but currently on a phone. Happy to provide citations when home
Estrogen becomes a real problem for people experimenting with anabolic steroids or even taking some of the TRT regimens which go past replacement doses and into performance enhancing territory.
Testosterone is converted into estradiol by aromatase, so people who boost their testosterone up to high levels get more estradiol as a result.
As an aside: Aromatase is present in body fat, so higher body fat will produce more sites for testosterone to convert to estradiol. This is one reason why higher body fat is correlated with lower testosterone. It’s also one reason why the decline of testosterone levels are correlated with the rise of obesity and you shouldn’t trust anyone who rants about declining testosterone levels without acknowledging that major correlation.
Back on topic: The increased estradiol production from excess testosterone can go above the normal range in men, which can cause a wide range of mental and physical problems. It can even promote growth of breast tissue that when left unchecked needs to be surgically removed later. Surgeons who deal with gynecomastia are seeing booming business right now due to all of the men going to TRT clinics and getting blasted with crazy doses of testosterone.
There are medications which reduce aromatase activity but they are very hard to get right. It’s a common story for men to suffer from excess estradiol after manipulating their testosterone, so they assume they can fix it with an aromatase inhibitor. They take slightly too much (which is very easy due to the dosing and duration of action) and crash their estradiol levels too low. Between the sudden swing in levels and the low level they can find themselves feeling a different kind of terrible. Someone I know become suicidal after taking an aromatase inhibitor at the ‘normal’ recommending broscience dosage. It took weeks to clear due to the dynamics of how everything returns to equilibrium. Very scary time.
Estradiol is highly active in the brain including regulation of key functions like MAO (the enzyme inhibited by MAOI antidepressants). One of many reasons why out-of-range levels or sudden fluctuations can make people feel bad in various ways.
Re #2, in the mtf trans experience high estrogen and low testosterone are correlated with low libido, with some individuals even temporarily stopping antiandrogen medications in order to get some back
Yeah, your comment squares with (and the GP's point #2 contradicts) what I learned in my college Science & Gender class, which was a combined neuroscience/psychology offering where we read a bunch of papers. Most of them supported that testosterone was the primary driver of libido in both men and women, with higher T levels corresponding to higher sexual desire and lower T levels corresponding to the opposite.
Any remedies to reverse this?
The damage the Women’s Health Initiative did to women’s health by conducting the flawed research that got HRT black boxed for twenty years really cannot be overstated. We went from a quarter of women being on estrogen replacement therapy post-menopause at the turn of the millennium to ~5% in 2020. A real case study in institutional failure.
The institution of science?
> Nearly two-thirds of Americans with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) are women, but the reasons why women are more vulnerable are still not fully understood. Scientists have long theorized that the loss of estrogen after menopause may reduce the brain’s natural protection against memory loss and neurodegeneration.
The part that makes no sense for me is men ending with smaller rates of dementia, given they had much less estrogen to begin with. Men have less incidence of dementia. Men also have much lager incidence of baldness. Did somebody already study if baldness and dementia are inversely correlated? I don't know, perhaps sunlight exposure in the scalp have neuroprotective effects?
Given the prevalence of baldness, and the downside of the condition for sexual attractiveness of its bearers, I suspect we will still discover some strong unexpected upside to explain why this trait was selected for regardless.
> baldness, and the downside of the condition for sexual attractiveness of its bearers
Just a guess, and I highly doubt there are any reliable statistics on this, but perhaps balding men are less likely to be tempted to abandon their family unit, thereby making it more likely that their children will thrive and carry on their genes?
I base this theory on my own experience, which is that I went completely bald in my early thirties and haven't had a second look from a woman ever since. Even if I were the sort to want to cheat on my wife, there wouldn't be any takers![0]
[0] I'm not claiming that bald men are necessarily sexually unattractive. I just know that it didn't work for me, looks-wise.
Just chiming in for anyone else reading this and worried about their hair thinning, this is a thing men worry about much more than women. Bruce Willis, Patrick Stewart, Michael Jordan, Vin Diesel - there have been plenty of bald sex symbols and plenty of women who enjoy that look (and the look of many average men of various builds and ages)
The factors of attractiveness are by far more related to basic self care (hygine and being fit enough to care for yourself and others), kindness and the ability to share in others' joy, and passionate interest in something, and a lightness or humor in your manner.
I started balding at 18, shaved it all at 22. Its not an issue. Height, hair, etc might get immediate reaction and attention, but hardly matter for real connections.
I just want to add that I wholeheartedly agree with this, and I would hate for anyone who's losing their hair to conclude that it's the end of the road for their love life.
Good grooming, a good sense of humor, and most importantly, generally being a good person, are what really matter.
This seems like an odd conclusion to draw. I'm married with a full head of hair and I couldn't tell you whether or not any woman has ever been interested because I'm not paying attention nor am I trying to draw it.
Good for you. I always did notice if there was a spark between me and someone I encountered. I wasn't going to act on it if I was already in a relationship, but I found it nice to feel that I had some physical appeal.
You also got older and probably less fit.
As a bald man my experience has been the main determining factor is how hard am I working on maintaining an athletic physique that year.
I think you’d want to reconsider the assumption that there is a big downside to baldness for sexual attractiveness.
Just anedoctal evidence, but I have a group of older coworkers, most in late 40s-early 50s, all divorced, and by their reports on their attempts at getting back at dating, success pretty much track how much hair is left. That made me a bit upset, as I'm slowly getting bald myself.
there is a huge difference between balding and bald
nobody wants to see a guy in denial clinging onto something, lean in fully
and yes it is unfortunate that different people are attracted to the bald variant than the ones you already know, but you gotta show resolve and confidence
> I suspect we will still discover some strong unexpected upside to explain why this trait was selected for regardless.
Its not selected for, it merely isn’t selected against
anything that occurs after reproduction starts isn't given the opportunity to be weeded out of the population
in this case, genes are passed into new humans overwhelmingly by men in their teens and twenties and thirties (with some stark outliers)
Men have significant estrogen:
Men: roughly 10–40 pg/mL Women (not at ovulation): roughly 30–40 pg/mL
At Ovulation, women spike. Hence, libido changes. If you know, you know.
Think you. I didn't know there was such overlap in the levels between both genders. Do men's levels also take a hit with age?
This fails to control for the fact that women, on average, live to older ages before dying.
> Nearly two-thirds of Americans with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) are women, but the reasons why women are more vulnerable are still not fully understood.
Women live much longer and more comfortable lives. Men are more likely to die before alzheimer can even manifest.
US life expectancy in 2024 for women was 81.4 years; for men, 76.5 [1]; “non-early” symptoms of Alzheimer's typically begin after 65 [2]. I don’t think that the life expectancy average offset of ~5 years is the main factor here.
1. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db548.htm 2. https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/alzheimers-di...
It also said "comfortable lives".
Also compare retirement ages, years worked, income (hard mental work)... it is well known that alzhaimer is corellated with brain activity (like solving suduku puzzles). Watching tv all day is not very healthy for brain...
Yes, I didn’t address that portion of your original post, as I was silently agreeing with you that men perform vital social and economic activity such as pick-up truck, football, and bitcoin, whereas women do nothing all day save for frivolous non-labor activities such as raising children.
Not sure you’re raising children when you’re 65.
Probably not, but I thought we were discussing all related preventative activities for the full span of the comfortable life.
Well, I went out to disprove your thesis, thinking we can easily look at countries where men live longer than women in another country.
For example, women in the US have a lower life expectancy than men in Australia (go figure). Now women are less than 1.4 times more likely than men to get dementia in australia, but about 2 times more likely to get alzheimer in the US. So that kind of points in your direction, but that is of course wildly inaccurate, cause one is mentioning dementia the other only alzheimer and whatnot.
https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/life-expectancy/ https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/dementia/dementia-in-aus/con... https://www.alz.org/getmedia/ef8f48f9-ad36-48ea-87f9-b740346...
Edit: qwen and glm seem to also agree with parent. "Age is the dominant risk factor".
Eh, are you citing sone peer-reviewed research or are you making stuff up?
It is just a bro science, sorry. Correlation and simple statistics is not real scientific method, and does not fit into modern research!
Then maybe caveat your posts with that
Memory is environment-associated. Which is to say, these memories that you have are connected to the environment that you find yourself in. Change your environment and your memory, to a degree proportional to the environment change, breaks.
This is why sometimes you enter a room and forget why you came in.
This can explain the phenomenon referred to in the op. A woman enters a room devoid of estrogen and her memory breaks.
Eh, have you seen any research on this or are you quoting own experience?
All of the claims above wrt memory reads quite mundane and adequately non assertive, but I'm a layperson.
I do believe it's well established that memory is associative. It's why roses are associated with love, because of Valentine's Day. If you see roses or smell roses, you will recall memories of your loved ones maybe, especially if you have given them roses.
Whether the decline in estrogen content of a room can be the dominant mechanism for momentary memory loss is a separate claim and more dubious sounding to me though (estrogen behaving like a pheromone??), but it's not like I have looked into this deeply so idk.
I'm a bit confused about exactly what's novel here. Here's an article from at least a year earlier talking about memory decline after menopause being linked to lower estrogen: https://health.clevelandclinic.org/memory-loss-in-middle-age...
The article keeps bouncing between talking about estrogen loss generally, and the extracellular matrix (ECM), and doesn't connect the two until about halfway through the article where it says estrogen loss was studied in the ECM... but then it goes back to talking about stuff unrelated to the ECM.
I thought "production" might be the key word here, but that's barely mentioned in the article either.
Looking at the actual study: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/acel.70551 the variables were: sex, age, stopping estrogen production in just the brain or the whole body. AFAIU:
1. Memory and social issues: old, female, either stoppage
2. Depression: either age, female, either stoppage
3. ECM changes: either age, either sex, reduced brain estrogen (whole body not tested?)
The article says:
> In mice, ... in females [estrogen] is produced predominantly in the brain.
But the paper says:
> In rodents, aromatase is expressed almost exclusively in the brain and gonads (Bulun et al. 2005; Zhao et al. 2009). Old female mice are thus heavily reliant on estrogen synthesis in the brain after the cessation of estrous cycles (equivalent to menopause in women).
IIUC in humans it's not produced in the brain, so the idea was to replicate that in mice artificially and see what affect it has on brain function. And... it led to decline in memory function in mice.
So I guess we're back to my first question, which is how was this commonly known if this is a new study drawing that link.
TLDR though I think the conclusion isn't that we've established a link, but that we've confirmed there's some other female-male difference that allows estrogen to have this effect.
Edit: no, I'm still confused. The paper concludes:
> Furthermore, brain-specific estrogen deficiency, achieved through targeted deletion of aromatase, led to alterations in hippocampal ECM that correlated with behavioral changes and memory impairment
This is wrong, right? Alterations to ECM happened in males and females, but the behavioral changes and memory impairment were in women only...
So they should drink more beer then?
btw guys, stop drinking beer. Makes you so so fat and give you tits. The more you know.
And for me - total stomach mess too.
For sure, beer is a great cure for constipation in that it causes liquid stools.