Word: estrogenous
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...that happens, scientists should in principle be able to help people like Washington for whom sex just isn't working. And indeed, over the past decade or two, scientists have identified many of the pieces of this complex puzzle. It clearly involves testosterone, along with other hormones, including estrogen and oxytocin, and brain chemicals such as dopamine, serotonin and norepinephrine. And there are numerous other bodily chemicals that turn us on, ranging from the commonplace, nitric oxide, to the obscure, vasoactive intestinal polypeptide...
Nevertheless, scientists are light-years ahead of where they were in the 1920s and '30s, when estrogen and testosterone were first identified, and they know a great deal more than they did in the 1940s, when Alfred Kinsey, followed by the research team of William Masters and Virginia Johnson in the 1960s, published some of the first scholarly studies of human sexuality. Those studies concluded that sexual response proceeds in distinct stages, beginning with excitement--erection in men, engorgement of vaginal and clitoral tissue in women--proceeding to orgasm and finally to "resolution," in which tissues return to their normal...
Women too seem to have problems getting interested in sex when their testosterone levels are too low, which is why Procter & Gamble is experimenting with testosterone patches. Says Altman: "When women are having normal menstrual cycles in their prime reproductive ages, their ovaries make two times more testosterone than estrogen." A few days before ovulation, triggered by surging levels of testosterone--along with other hormones including progesterone and estrogen--sexual desire peaks, according to new research by Martha McClintock of the University of Chicago that dispels a long-held theory that fertility precedes desire...
...women, at least, estrogen may also be crucial. "Give estrogen to women with decreased desire," says Pfaus, "and you don't restore desire. Give them testosterone alone, and you get a little increase in desire. Give them estrogen and testosterone together, and you get a whopping increase." Why? Some research suggests that testosterone's role in women is diversionary: it attaches to so-called steroid-binding globulins in the blood that would otherwise latch onto estrogen molecules and render them inert. The testosterone is taken away to the liver, while the estrogen is free to make a lust-inducing dash...
Each year about 212,000 women in the U.S. are found to have breast cancer; half of them are postmenopausal and have tumors studded with receptors for estrogen or progesterone. These growths are perfect targets for tamoxifen and letrozole, which block estrogen's tumor-enhancing effects, albeit through two different mechanisms. "Estrogen is like the fuel that runs a car engine," says Dr. James Ingle, who headed the U.S. portion of the trial at the Mayo Clinic. "If you remove the fuel, the engine quits running...