When most people think of hormonal functions, they think about sex and gender, but hormones help control and regulate far more than the sexual and reproductive functions. Hormones also control many other chemical processes in our bodies. Diabetes, for example, is, in part, a result of hormone deficiency. Thyroid problems, such as Graves’ disease, are also based on hormone deficiency. These are just a few of the diseases and disorders that are caused because the cells responsible for producing a hormone are either too few, or are not functioning properly. For much of modern history, doctors have treated these disorders mostly by treating the symptoms they cause. More recently, the medical community has treated hormone deficiency with hormone replacement therapy. Hormone replacement therapies pose a number of problems that are not an issue when these disorders are treated with strategies using stem cells.
The Problems with Hormone Replacement Therapy
When your system doesn’t produce enough of a particular hormone, doctors typically respond by prescribing hormones, either by mouth or through injection. These include injections of human growth hormone for young people who are not growing normally, testosterone treatments for men suffering from a wide range of age-related maladies and estrogen replacement therapy for women who undergo partial hysterectomy, early menopause or are post-menopause.
The problem with hormone replacement therapy is that it doesn’t address the underlying issue – the malfunction of the cells that should be supplying those hormones. Because science had no way to repair or replace the cells in question, doctors resigned themselves to simply supplying the hormones – either natural or synthetic – artificially. Some people can’t tolerate synthetic hormones. Others may have allergies to the animals used to cultivate the “natural” hormones. No matter what the case, though, using hormone replacement therapy for hormone deficiency is rather like constantly refilling a flat tire with air without ever addressing the underlying problem – the hole in the tire.
How Stem Cells May Help
Stem cells are unspecialized or partially specialized cells present in everyone’s bodies, which have the capacity to develop into more specialized cells, including those that manufacture the hormones your body needs. So far, scientists have been able to extract stem cells from urine, bone marrow, blood, skin and other body tissues. Until very recently, it was believed that those stem cells – called adult stem cells to differentiate them from embryonic stem cells – could only develop into cells that could be used in the system from which they were taken. Recent research, though, suggests otherwise. Stem cells in bone marrow, for example, can produce blood cells and heart muscle cells. In addition, some scientists have developed ways to regress adult stem cells, and restore the ability for them to differentiate into any type of cell found in the body.
These advances open entirely new avenues for treatment of hormone deficiency that rely upon stem cells taken from the patient’s own body to repair and replace damaged or depleted hormone-producing cells. While there is still research to be done in using stem cells to treat specific types of hormone deficiency, there are many clinics and hospitals in the country that are using more general stem cell treatments to help rejuvenate all of body’s systems.