The older sister has been in a bad mood lately; the father yells at the TV while watching football; when the mother was pregnant, she cried constantly for no reason. And they are said to be to blame for all the trouble, as one hears again and again: the hormones. They supposedly play a major role during pregnancy, in puberty anyway, and the sex hormone testosterone is said to be to blame for the fact that even fathers sometimes behave like bullies.
Johanna Kuroczik
Editor in the "Science" section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.
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But hormones can do much more: In fact, there is virtually no area of our body that is not controlled by them. Some ensure that we can fall asleep peacefully, that hugs create a pleasant feeling or that we don't have to pee all the time. What is it actually, a hormone? And how do these mysterious all-rounders work?
Simply put, hormones are the biochemical messengers in our bodies. If this were a factory, they would dash through the aisles and deliver orders from one department to another, making sure that operations kept running. At the beginning of the 20th century, its namesake, the English professor of physiology Ernest Starling at University College London, was inspired by the ancient Greek term for "propulsion" to the name "hormones" when he reported on his experiments in lectures in 1905.
At that time, he discovered a substance that caused the pancreas to produce masses of fluid. Now, the pancreas is not exactly the most famous of all organs. Everyone knows the heart and lungs, but the pancreas? Nevertheless, it is enormously important, it produces substances that we need to obtain energy from food. The very first known hormone that Starling co-discovered is "secretin", but more than a hundred other human hormones have since been discovered.
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Almost all aspects of life are controlled by hormones: breathing, heartbeat, sleep, but also how stressed we are and how happy. They have very different structures, some consist of proteins, others belong to the so-called steroids. Hormones are very small, much smaller than a human cell, and are usually released into the blood by so-called glands. Everyone knows the principle of glands: just as our salivary glands in the mouth produce spit when we smell something delicious, there are glands throughout the body that, if necessary, produce certain substances. Some hormones are produced in our adrenal cortex, others in our thyroid gland and especially many in our brain.
In the organ of thought, three regions with complicated names are particularly important: the hypothalamus, the posterior pituitary gland and the pituitary gland. For example, growth hormone is produced in the brain, which then stimulates growth in the bones, or a hormone that ensures that the kidney retains enough fluid in the blood and that we do not have to go to the toilet all the time. For completeness: There are also hormones that are produced in the tissue, but they do not travel through the whole body, but only transmit a message to the neighboring cells.