How do puberty blockers work in simple words?
In: Biology
Puberty starts when the hypothalamus, a part of your brain, starts releasing a hormone called Gonadotropin Releasing Hormone (GnRH) when you’re 10-13 years old.
GnRH signals your pituitary to begin to make and release other hormones that cause the sexual organs to finish maturity and become fictional to reproduce (sperm and egg production, breast development, and other puberty changes).
The GnRH signal isn’t steady. It’s pulsatile. Meaning the brain releases it in regular but varying amounts. It’s that pulsatile signal the pituitary listens to. If you had no GnRH or a steady stream of GnRH, the pituitary would not release the puberty hormones.
So to fight a family of diseases called precocious puberty, where puberty changes happened less than 8 year old and could lead to severe short stature and other issues. Scientists found if you give someone a regular dose of synthetic GnRH, you pause puberty. Later you stop giving the synthetic GnRH and the brains own pulsatile GnRH takes over and puberty can then happen. It’s unpaused. And development can happen at the appropriate time.
“Puberty blocker” is a poor name. Puberty pauser is a more apt description of what GnRN analogues are
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