• Question: If someone lost hormones really, really quickly, would their body be able to replace them before they died?

    Asked by abbie520 to Derek, Elaine, Heather, Keith on 27 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Heather Eyre

      Heather Eyre answered on 27 Jun 2013:

      Wow, good question!

      I’d think you’d probably die.

      Some hormones like the sex hormones you wouldn’t miss providing you could replace them. But without insulin and glucagon you’d end up starving the brain of sugar pretty quickly. I think it’d be too much of a shock, and people die from shock.

    • Photo: Keith Siew

      Keith Siew answered on 27 Jun 2013:

      I’m going to go with no… they’d probably die…

      Assuming you had some magic delete button… and you selected all the hormones in your body… and then hit DELETE!!!

      Well everything would simply stop working… some hormones are produced very quickly and others are very slow and take time to build up to normal levels in the body… Not only that but the hormones also regulate one another and without them some hormones can’t do their jobs properly… even if we take insulin for example… without it your body can’t use the sugar in your blood supply so cells would start to starve without an energy source!

      It’s quite likely your blood pressure would plummet without the normal hormones to keep it in check… which would be quite dangerous too!

Comments

  • Photo: Elaine

    Elaine commented on :

    As long as you didn’t lose the capacity totally to replace the hormones you probably wouldn’t. But I suspect you would be very, very sick whilst your body raced to replace the lost hormones. I am think here especially of diabeties, type 1. This is when your body can’t make enough insulin. If you remain untreated you can become quite poorly but once your lost levels have been replace the recovery is amazingly quick.

    Any one else think of any thing??