• Question: why do people get hormones?

    Asked by madeleineh to Jen, Mel, Stef on 21 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Stefan Piatek

      Stefan Piatek answered on 21 Mar 2013:

      I’m going to take a guess that this is why is puberty so frustrating type of thing.

      So hormones are actually really clever, like your nerves they are essentially signals that tell parts of the body to do things, the really great thing about them is that they can go everywhere and act on loads of different organs and types of cells. Everyone has hormones like insulin which regulates the sugar in your blood, and there are hormones to control how much water we have in us too!

      Dropping back to where I assume this question was based, in puberty your sex hormones (oestrogen and progesterone among others) are really important to change us from children to adults. It’s quite interesting that we have such a long time to go from being born to an adult form, which is probably linked evolutionarily to why we have family structure – we need to be looked after for quite a long time compared to other animals!

      Hope that helps answer your question.

    • Photo: Jennifer Paxton

      Jennifer Paxton answered on 21 Mar 2013:

      Hormones are really just special chemical that travel around in your bloodstream and signal to other parts of the body to do things. You have lots and lots of hormones circulating around your body every day doing different jobs so they are essential for us to work properly.

      At puberty you get an increase in sex hormones that change your body from a childs into an adults. The huge increase in these hormones can affect your mind too and so your moods! This adjustment can actually be quite difficult to get used to at first!

      Women in pregnancy also have lots of pregnancy hormones that can make them tired, emotional and irritable!

    • Photo: Melissa Brereton

      Melissa Brereton answered on 21 Mar 2013:

      We all need hormones to be able to survive! They allow all the different organs in our body to talk to each other and tell them how to work properly! Any changes to the levels of our hormones can have huge problems. For instance people who don’t have enough growth hormone are really short, people who lack insulin cannot regulate the levels of sugar in their blood so they become diabetic, even some cancers produce too many hormones! Hormones can also affect your mood and make people grumpy! During puberty, the levels of hormones in your body are altered which explains why our bodies change so much during this time

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