What steroids are and how they work. Not just the muscles gym kind, but also the medecine
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Corticosteroids are I’m guessing what you are referring to, and they, among other things, mimic or are just exogenous versions of what your body produces naturally. You may have heard of “cortisol” and how it is a stress hormone – it does more than just stress response but it is one of the core corticosteroids. In medicine, these are most commonly used because high levels of the decrease the activity of the immune system, and reduce inflammation.
The sex hormones estrogen, progesterone and testosterone are also steroids are are important in developing sex characteristics. It happens that testosterone and its derivatives are also anabolic steroids, which means steroids that help build. Anabolic steroids are what people trying to build muscle use, though they usually use something stronger than just testosterone, as it helps build muscle faster, but also has negative side-effects. For trans people, testosterone, testosterone blockers and estrogens are used for medical, non-surgical transitioning, and progesterone is used in a lot of birth control pills as it regulates the period cycle.
Cholesterol is also a steroid. Steroid simply means it has 4 fused carbon rings in its structure. There are other steroids in eg. plants like the phytoestrogens of soy people like to bring up. Some have medical significants, others do not.
Vitamin D is also related to steroids, as the body creates a precursor to vitamin D from cholesterol that is itself a steroid, and UV light exposure on your skin is used to break apart the ring structure for it to be converted to active vitamin D.
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