I have never heard of these things you mentioned. Would you mind explaining more in depth? Or directing me somewhere i could learn more about it?
The balance of the
endocrine system within the body is incredibly complicated but the
forced imbalance very simply can lead to an array of side-effects. The body likes to keep itself in a fairly narrow range of hormonal "
homeostasis" and has various mechanisms (
feedback loops) that seek to re-balance what has become imbalanced.
To simplify the many processes for the purpose of this discussion, when the body has too much Testosterone (T), it
upregulates the conversion to Estrogen (E) to "suppress" some of the T. When we lower T, the body will seek to make more of it by increasing (aka upregulating) various hormones or enzymes that will eventually lead to an increase in T. When E becomes too low, the body will create more enzymes that convert T to E (aromatase), and so on and so forth. It's a dance and the body is always trying to maintain the same dance partners.
When this same balance is disrupted, certain hormones may play a larger role than they did before (
agonism vs.
antagonism) and thus create an environment whereby different cellular processess take place (to some degree). If DHT is an antagonist (enemy) of E, it will in essence "compete" with it for
control of estrogen receptor sites (hormone docking stations), among other things. If we were to drastically lower DHT, for instance by taking finasteride (a 5aR inhibitor), we would then create an environment whereby we had more T (up to ~ 10%) because of a lower ability to convert to DHT, and also more E because the body will then have more T available to convert to E. This imbalance (when exagerated) can often times lead to gynecomastia because there is less male (as well as more female) hormones within the body. If E is more available, and has less competition for the estrogen receptor (
ER), we then know that upregulation of cellular processes or increased expression (cellular activation/
transcription) occurs, causing more "estrogen-like" processes to take place throughout the body. In essence, the ability for Estrogen to "bind" to it's receptor and activate transcriptional process has increased. Levels of enzymes like aromatse, SHBG, 17bHSD, 5aR (and many others) may all be varied to allow for the body to "check" these imbalances and try to re-gain that homeostasis.
All of the hormones within the body have a sort of syngerism with eachother - far beyond just the often-discussed T,E and DHT. There are so many hormones and enzymes within the body that there is no way to know how changing the balance will ultimately affect any one particular individual when compared to the next. This is why cycles vary so much, and the measures we take (AI/SERM/etc.) to control that balance can change drastically from person to person. Cycle guidelines are great but by no means do they make for a
set-in-stone cycle.
"
Steroids" are not just benign compounds that only affect muscle and bone. They affect the brain, organs, hair, our personality, cellular
proliferation and
apoptosis, as well as many other processes. When we change
who, what, where and
when, we have the answer to "why".