Women's Health: What is Puberty?

Apart from the first year of your lives the most growing that you do happens during puberty. All of a sudden, most of you seem to be growing out of clothes and shoes at an alarming rate as you go into a full-on growth spurt (a period of rapid growth usually encountered around puberty ).

• Do your feet and hands seem to be in different places all the time?
• Have you turned into an eating machine?
  
• Do you get weird pains in strange places?
  
• Do your moods change from one minute to the next?
  
• Do your hair and skin get greasy?
• Does your body seem to be doing its own thing?
• Is your mind working overtime trying to deal with all the changes?

Do not panic!

Everyone goes through this stage, even your parents did! (In the distant olden days of course.)

So what is puberty?

The span of time between childhood and adolescence in which the body undergoes biological changes that effect both male and female physical and emotional development.

Two parts of the brain called the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland start making a lot more of some hormones including growth hormone, LH (lute-in-ising hormone) and FSH (follicle stimulating hormone). These hormones act on other parts of your body to make the changes happen.

Both boys and girls have these hormones but they act on different parts of their bodies.

Hormones are chemicals that are made by one part of your body (a gland) to act on a different part, such as bones. For example a gland in your brain makes growth hormone, and it works by making your leg, foot and arm bones grow longer. You have many hormones that travel around in your bloodstream doing different jobs.

For boys:
the LH and FSH work on their testes and adrenal glands (glands next to the kidneys) to make androgens (sex hormones) such as testosterone. They also work on the testes so that they start to make sperm.

For girls:
these hormones work on their ovaries (where all the eggs that they might ever use have been stored since before they were born), as well as on their adrenal glands, so that they make more of the female sex hormones such as oestrogen and progesterone

Both boys and girls have some of all of these hormones but boys have more androgens and girls have more oestrogens, and the different levels of these hormones make the differences in their bodies.

It is the action of these hormones getting your body ready for adult life that we call " Puberty".