Hormones have a profound effect on your everyday health and well-being. Hormones have individual affects, but also interact with each other to produce dramatic effects in the body. When your hormones are out of balance it can cause many health-related problems. The following common symptoms are associated with hormonal imbalance.
1. Fatigue:
Fatigue is mental or physical exhaustion that stops a person from being able to function normally. However, fatigue is more than just feeling tired or drowsy ¿ it is normal to become tired through physical or mental effort.
Fatigue is caused by prolonged periods of physical and/or mental exertion without enough time to rest and recover. The level of fatigue varies, and depends on the following:
* Workload;
* Length of the shift;
* Previous hours and days worked; and
* Time of day or night worked.
2. Forgetfulness:
You forget where you put your keys, often misplace your glasses and certainly can't remember names as well as you used to. At bedtime, you stare haplessly into the bathroom mirror, wondering whether you've already brushed your teeth. Once you showed up for a dinner date at the wrong restaurant. What's happening? Should you regard these lapses as a sign of more serious memory problems, maybe even Alzheimer's?
Forget it. Mental slips like these are a normal part of mid-life. Even teenagers, capable of reeling off entire CDs of rock lyrics, occasionally blank out--though one might be suspicious of instances involving chores requested by parents or teachers. Unless your forgetfulness is accompanied by deeper failures in reasoning and logic, it's nothing to fret about. After all, if being absentminded were a sign of mental disarray, you'd have to write off Einstein, who bungled simple arithmetic even while working on relativity.
3. Mood Swings:
Mood swings are commonly associated with mood disorders including bipolar disorder (manic depression) and depression. In patients with cases of bipolar disorder, the patient experiences serious mood swings that last for days or even weeks. These episodes consist of the patient alternating rapidly between depression and euphoria. Another major cause of mood swings are hyperactivity or hyperactivity/inattentiveness, as they are occasionally seen in individuals diagnosed with Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
If the mood swing is not associated with a mood disorder, treatments are harder to assign. Most commonly, however, mood swings can be a result of dealing with daily life and/or unexpected situations. Other causes of mood swings are due to hormonal changes, temporarily upsetting brain chemistry. As the hormones involved normalize, these mood swings generally subside on their own.
4. Night Sweats:
Sleep hyperhidrosis, more commonly known as the night sweats, is the occurrence of excessive sweating (hyperhidrosis) during sleep. The sufferer may or may not also suffer from excessive perspiration while awake. Sleep hyperhidrosis may occur at any age, but is most commonly seen in early adulthood. Night sweats may occur for genetic reasons and may be relatively harmless. However, they can be distressing and disrupt sleep patterns if severe; the patient may be frequently awakened due to the discomfort of damp sleepwear or bedding. One of the most common causes of night sweats in women over 40 is the hormonal changes related to menopause and perimenopause. This is a very common occurrence during the menopause transition years and while annoying, it is not necessarily dangerous or a sign of underlying disease. Some women experience night sweats during pregnancy due to hormonal changes.
While some causes of night sweats may be relatively harmless, others may not and can be a sign of a serious underlying disease. While there can be several possible causes of excessive sweating at night, it is important to distinguish night sweats due to medical causes from those that occur simply because the sleep environment is too warm, either because the bedroom is unusually hot or because there are too many covers on the bed. A night sweat caused by a medical condition or infection can be described as ‘severe hot flashes occurring at night that can drench sleepwear and sheets, which are not related to an overheated environment’. Some of the underlying medical conditions and infections that cause these severe night sweats can be life-threatening and should promptly be investigated by a medical practitioner.
5. Weight Gain:
Weight gain is an increase in body weight. This can be either an increase in muscle mass, fat deposits, or excess fluids such as water. Muscle gain or weight gain can occur as a result of exercise or bodybuilding, in which muscle size is increased through strength training. If enough weight is gained by way of increased body fat deposits, one may become overweight or fat, generally defined as having more body fat (adipose tissue) than is optimally healthy.
Weight gain has a latency period. The effect that eating has on weight gain can vary greatly depending on the following factors: energy (calorie) density of foods, exercise regimen, amount of water intake, amount of salt contained in the food, time of day eaten, age of individual, individual's country of origin, individual's overall stress level, and amount of water retention in ankles/feet. Typical latency periods vary from three days to two weeks after ingestion.
6. Mental Confusion:
Confusion may result from a relatively sudden brain dysfunction. Acute confusion is often called delirium (also called acute confusional state, although delirium also includes a broader array of disorders than confusion, e.g. inability to focus attention and various impairments in awareness and temporal and spatial orientation.
Confusion is a symptom, and it may range from mild to severe. The confused state may include jumbled or disorganized thought and unusual, bizarre, or aggressive behaviors. A person who is confused may have difficulty solving problems or tasks, especially those known to have been previously easy for the person and an inability to recognize family members or familiar objects, or to give approximate location of family members not present. As well, they may appear to be disoriented, drowsy, hyperactive, or anxious. In severe cases, the person may have hallucinations, feelings of paranoia, and a state of delirium.
7. Hot Flashes:
Hot flashes (also known as hot flushes, or night sweats if they happen at night) are a symptom of the changing hormone levels that are considered to be characteristic of menopause.[1] Hot flashes, a common symptom of menopause and perimenopause, are typically experienced as a feeling of intense heat with sweating and rapid heartbeat, and may typically last from two to thirty minutes for each occurrence. The sensation of heat usually begins in the face or chest, although it may appear elsewhere such as the back of the neck, and it can spread throughout the whole body. Some women pass out if the effects are strong enough.[citation needed] In addition to being an internal sensation, the surface of the skin, especially on the face, becomes hot to the touch. This is the origin of the alternative term "hot flush," since the sensation of heat is often accompanied by visible reddening of the face. Excessive flushing can lead to rosacea.
The hot-flash event may be repeated a few times each week or constantly throughout the day, with the frequency reducing over time.[citation needed] Hot flashes may begin to appear several years before menopause starts and last for years afterwards. Some women undergoing menopause never have hot flashes. Others have mild or infrequent flashes. The worst sufferers experience dozens of hot flashes each day. In addition, hot flashes are often more frequent and more intense during hot weather or in an overheated room, the surrounding heat apparently making the hot flashes themselves both more probable and more severe. Severe hot flashes can make it difficult to get a full night's sleep (often characterized as insomnia), which in turn can affect mood, impair concentration, and cause other physical problems. When hot flashes occur at night, they are called "night sweats." As estrogen is typically lowest at night, some women get night sweats without having any hot flashes during the daytime.
8. Irritability:
Irritability is an excessive response to stimuli. The term is used for both the physiological reaction to stimuli and for the pathological, abnormal or excessive sensitivity to stimuli; It is usually used to refer to anger or frustration. Irritability may be demonstrated in behavioral responses to both physiological and behavioral stimuli including environmental, situational, sociological, and emotional stimuli.
9. Thyroid Problems:
The thyroid gland or simply, the thyroid, in vertebrate anatomy, is one of the largest endocrine glands. The thyroid gland is found in the neck, below (inferior to) the thyroid cartilage (which forms the laryngeal prominence, or "Adam's apple"). The isthmus (the bridge between the two lobes of the thyroid) is located inferior to the cricoid cartilage. The thyroid gland controls how quickly the body uses energy, makes proteins, and controls how sensitive the body is to other hormones. It participates in these processes by producing thyroid hormones, the principal ones being triiodothyronine (T3) and thyroxine (T4). These hormones regulate the rate of metabolism and affect the growth and rate of function of many other systems in the body. T3 and T4 are synthesized from both iodine and tyrosine. The thyroid also produces calcitonin, which plays a role in calcium homeostasis.
Hormonal output from the thyroid is regulated by thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH) produced by the anterior pituitary, which itself is regulated by thyrotropin-releasing hormone (TRH) produced by the hypothalamus. The thyroid gets its name from the Greek word for "shield", due to the shape of the related thyroid cartilage. The most common problems of the thyroid gland consist of an overactive thyroid gland, referred to as hyperthyroidism, and an underactive thyroid gland, referred to as hypothyroidism.
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