A new study released in UT Southwestern Medical Center, showed that estrogen can control things in the body which can affects the body weight, those things are energy expenditure, appetite and body weight, in addition this study said that in the other hand, if the estrogen is not sufficiently received in specific parts in the brain, it may cause obesity as a result.
In this issue Dr. Deborah Clegg, associate professor of internal medicine, said that the estrogen has large effect on metabolism, while it’s really new for them, and never done before to this about sex hormones as a main and important regulators of food intake and body weight.
This study was first made on mice as their study was the first to reveal that estrogen, acting through two hypothalamic neural centers in the brain, can control weight in female bodies by regulating hunger and energy expenditure. as the tests on mice showed that when they don’t have the estrogen receptor alpha (which is molecule that is responsible of sending signals of estrogen to neurons) in those specific part of the brain can become an obese and also may have other diseases like diabetes and heart disease, while these studies didn’t show the same results on male mice, however the researchers assured that there must be an estrogen receptor sites which is still unknown to them which plays the same rule in doing the regulation method in male mice as well as female ones.
The place of these receptors is throughout the body, however researchers said they could manage to determine two specific populations of estrogen receptors that can control the balancing of energy for female mice.
This subject and these study is considered important for postmenopausal women, as many of were against hormonal replacement therapy, this study is subjected to lead into new hormonal replacement therapies in which estrogen must reach a specific place in the brain and do the job required which is to control the weight of the body, including that this therapy avoid the risk of full body estrogen maintaining such as breast cancer and stroke.
As some studies released in 2002 showed that hormone can also be a reason behind the increased risk of cardiovascular disease, many doctors stopped telling their menopausal women to undergo long-term estrogen therapy as a result of that study, but a doctor said that in concerning the job of estrogen in postmenopausal women is still unknown for sure.