Estrogen: Wonder hormone?

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20080105/bob10.asp

Summary: Estrogen was believed to only affect reproduction in women. Therefore, until recently, the only receptor known was the estrogen receptor ά (ERά) , found in the uterus. But about a decade ago the discovery of another estrogen receptor, estrogen receptor β (ERβ), changed the entire field of estrogen study.
Estrogen circulates in the blood and is produced largely in the ovaries, as well as the liver, adrenal glands, breasts, and testes. Estrogen initiates it effect by entering an organ and attaching to receptors, modifying the behavior of the gene.
About the time the ERβ was discovered by Dr. Gustafsson, Dr. Korach was doing studies in mice lacking ERά. He was surprised they lived at all. The discovery of the second receptor seemed to answer the question of how they survived but when Korach bred mice lacking both receptors, they still survived. This proved you didn’t need the use of estrogen to live. However, those mice missing specifically the ERβ suffered from obesity, brittle bones, large spleens, few, small litters, high blood pressure, and a disease similar to leukemia. Almost every major organ system in the mice was affected. The list of health problems continues to grow.
While the ERά were the only ones found in the ovaries, the discovery of the second receptor showed that it too existed in the ovaries. But because it was believed that estrogen was involved in only reproduction, no one had ever bothered to look for another receptor. The discovery of the ERβ in the ovaries and uterus led to studies to see whether or not the blockage of ERβ could be used as a form of birth control, since the ERβ and ERά don’t exist in the same cell.
The discovery of this new receptor has opened a wave of possibility for the medical community concerning birth control but there is a plethora of other fields feeling the shockwave of change from this breakthrough.
Phytoestrogens, found in soy and coffee, are believed to be key in lowering the risk of prostrate and breast cancer. The discovery of the estrogen ERβ is monumental because it responds more effectively that the ERά does. Not only does it prove promising in fighting cancer, it is seen to hold preventive promise. When estrogen binds to ά receptors in a cell, it signals it to begin duplicating. But if something goes wrong in that replication, ERβ brings it to a halt. That occurs because compounds that bind only ERβ stop the cell multiplication. This earns ERβ the nick name of “watchdog”.
Therefore, it is no surprise to scientists that there are more ERβ in healthy prostrate and breast tissue than in cancerous ones, which is why the cancer develops in the first place.
The last field that has made significant advances thanks to the discovery of the ERβ is that of pain treatment. Women that are being treated for breast cancer with aromatase inhibitors, a drug that stops the production of estrogen, report feeling pain over their entire body. There is no or very little estrogen, so it doesn’t bind with ERά or ERβ. Because of new experiments done with mice, there is believed to be link between pain and ERβ.
This led to the theory that there is a link between ERβ and pain, and ERβ and depression. When ERά is stimulated, mice become anxious and isolated; when ERβ is stimulated they don’t show these behaviors.
Opinion: I thought that this article was very interesting because it showed how far we still have to go. Something that we thought we understood, estrogen, turned out to have unpredictable effects in previously unthinkable areas. The idea that estrogen is linked to birth controlled really surprised me, because you think that it would be easy to stop the egg from dropping but there is really so much more involved in it. Again, this article just shows me how complicated God created us. I feel that this article also shows God’s sense of humor. He took something so universally stereotyped as the dominant female hormone and established it to have so many more effects.