LOST IN THE LAND OF THE ENDOCRINE GLANDS – It’s a Lot to Punch Your Way Through

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adrenal glands

The adrenal glands are one of the endocrine glands. Located at the top of each kidney, the adrenal glands produce hormones that help the body control blood sugar, burn protein and fat, react to stressors like a major illness or injury, and regulate blood pressure. They produce hormones that you can’t live without, including aldosterone and cortisol. Often called “the stress hormone,” cortisol influences, regulates or modulates many of the changes that occur in the body in response to stress including, but not limited to:

  • Blood sugar (glucose) levels
  • Fat, protein and carbohydrate metabolism to maintain blood glucose (gluconeogenesis)
  • Immune responses
  • Anti-inflammatory actions
  • Blood pressure
  • Heart and blood vessel tone and contraction
  • Central nervous system activation

Cushing’s Not So Cushy

Cushing’s syndrome is a rare condition that is the result of the body producing too much of the hormone cortisol by itself. Some patients have the illness because the adrenal glands have a tumor making too much of the hormone. Other patients have it because they make too much of the hormone ACTH. Cushing’s syndrome is fairly rare. It is more often found in women than in men, and often occurs between the ages of 20 and 40.

Well, that’s Cushing disease. Another little known endocrine gland disease is call Addison’s disease. Addison’s disease is a disorder that occurs when your body produces insufficient amounts of cortisol and often insufficient levels of aldosterone as well. Also called adrenal insufficiency, Addison’s disease occurs in all age groups and affects both sexes. Addison’s disease can be life-threatening. Addison’s disease symptoms usually develop slowly, so you might not even realize anything is wrong.

The Best Guide You Can Get

It’s pretty easy to confuse endocrine diseases and disorders with other disorders and health issues, because many seems the same. So many people see a lot of doctors before finally receiving a proper diagnosis. They feel frustrated on top of not feeling well, all because they don’t actually know where they should go. Seeing a hormone specialist is a good place to start, and Dr. Stephen A. Goldstein MD, F.A.C.S. at Denver Hormone Health is one of the best in the area. If it has to do with the endocrine system and hormones, he’s on top of it. He has had years of experience and expertise in treating patients in the same predicament as you. You might not know where to start in explaining what you’re experience because it can be so complicated, but Dr. Goldstein understands, and he’s there for you in every way possible. With simple tests, he can pinpoint any imbalances that are making you feel out of it all over. Then he creates a totally unique treatment plan just for you. No one-size-fits-all, ever.

So, call to make an appointment now.

Replace feeling frustrated with feeling your best.

LOST IN THE LAND OF THE ENDOCRINE GLANDS – A Basic Lay of the Land

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endocrine diseases

We’ve laid out the long, long, interminably unending list of endocrine diseases and disorders, but there are two that just about everyone has heard about and a lot of people are effected by; diabetes, and thyroid disease.

No Sugar Coating It

Diabetes is the most common endocrine disorder diagnosed in the U.S. You’ve heard about insulin as related to diabetes, but what you might not know is that insulin is a natural hormone made by the pancreas that controls the level of the sugar glucose in the blood. Insulin permits cells to use glucose for energy. Cells cannot utilize glucose without insulin. Very often, you might hear the term diabetes mellitus and think it’s some other dubious form of diabetes. But diabetes mellitus is the catch-all for diabetes of every kind. Here are the two most common:

Type 1 Diabetes:
This occurs when the body loses the ability to make insulin or can only make a very small amount of insulin. Type 1 diabetes is usually caused by an autoimmune process, and your body’s immune system mistakenly destroys the insulin-producing cells. About 10% of individuals with diabetes have type 1 diabetes. A number of medical risks are associated with type 1 diabetes. Many of them stem from damage to the tiny blood vessels in your eyes (called diabetic retinopathy), nerves (diabetic neuropathy), and kidneys (diabetic nephropathy). Even more serious is the increased risk of heart disease and stroke.

Type 2 Diabetes:
Type 2 diabetes is the most common form of diabetes and represents 80% to 90% of diabetes worldwide. This type often develops from pre-diabetes or borderline diabetes. Prediabetes is characterized by the presence of blood glucose levels that are higher than normal but not yet high enough to be classed as diabetes. With Type 2 diabetes, the pancreas usually produces some insulin. But either the amount produced is not enough for the body’s needs, or the body’s cells are resistant to it. Insulin resistance, or lack of sensitivity to insulin, happens primarily in fat, liver, and muscle cells. People who are obese — more than 20% over their ideal body weight for their height — are at particularly high risk of developing type 2 diabetes and its related medical problems. Their obesity, causes them to have insulin resistance. With insulin resistance, the pancreas has to work overly hard to produce more insulin. But even then, there is not enough insulin to keep sugars normal.  There is no cure for diabetes. Type 2 diabetes can, however, be controlled with weight management, nutrition, and exercise. Unfortunately, type 2 diabetes tends to progress, so you have to keep on top of it.

Cutting Through the Thyroid Thicket

The largest of all the endocrine glands is the thyroid gland.  Often, when people gain weight, they rush to attribute it to a thyroid problem rather than an Oreo overload or an overload of any food just loaded with bad stuff. (Like we need to tell you what that bad stuff is.) Thyroid disorders follow closely behind diabetes in the United States. About 20 million Americans have some type of thyroid disorder. Your thyroid gland makes hormones that tell your body’s systems how fast work. When you have too much thyroid hormone, your systems work in overdrive. When you have too little, your body becomes sluggish. Thyroid hormones regulate how the body breaks down food and either uses that energy immediately or stores it for the future. In other words, our thyroid hormones regulate our body’s metabolism virtually influencing every organ system in the body.

He’ll Map It All Out

It’s a fact, that most people think they have every symptom there is. What to think? What to do? Well, doing nothing is the one thing you can’t afford to do. Before you think the worst, think of the best thing you can do. See Dr. Stephen A. Goldstein MD, F.A.C.S. at Denver Hormone Health. The endocrine system is all about hormones, and Dr. Goldstein is one of the most renowned hormone specialists in the Denver area. He has years of experience and expertise and keeps up with the most advanced studies in the field. If you go in to see him in a panic, the first thing he’ll do is make you feel comfortable. With simple tests, he can determine what your issues are, and if they are a result of hormone imbalance, he can get them back in balance with a unique treatment plan tailored just for you.

So, call now for an appointment.

It’s the beginning of the road to good health.

LOST IN THE LAND OF THE ENDOCRINE GLANDS – It’s a Hormone Jungle Out There

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Hormone Jungle

The body seems to have all these interweaving systems, and the endocrine system seems to be one of the more complex. The major endocrine glands include the pineal gland, pituitary gland, pancreas, ovaries, testes, thyroid gland, parathyroid gland, and adrenal glands. These glands make hormones. Hormones are chemical messengers. They travel through your bloodstream to tissues or organs. Hormones work slowly and affect body processes from head to toe. The endocrine system influences how your heart beats, how your bones and tissues grow, even your ability to make a baby. It plays a vital role in whether or not you develop diabetes, thyroid disease, growth disorders, sexual dysfunction, and a host of other hormone-related disorders. The endocrine system affects almost every organ and cell in the body,

Wish it Were Never-Never Land, but No Luck

The endocrine has a feedback system that helps control the balance of hormones in the bloodstream. If your body has too much or too little of a certain hormone, it signals the proper gland or glands to correct the problem. A hormone imbalance may occur if this feedback system has trouble keeping the right level of hormones in the bloodstream, or if your body doesn’t clear them out of the bloodstream properly. Because there’s there are so many endocrine glands, it’s sometimes hard to know what’s going on one way or another. Not fun, but it happens. And can happen to anyone.

A Jurassic Park of Disease and Disorder

Needless to say, we’re not going to go into the endless list of endocrine disorders. It could fill years of blogs. You could get old and grey just trying to keep up. Intimidating? Understatement. But just a peek at some of the different types of endocrine problems is enough to make you send up the “help”! signals.

  • Acromegaly (Say what???)
  • Addison’s Disease
  • Adrenal Cancer
  • Adrenal Disorders
  • Anaplastic Thyroid Cancer
  • Cushing’s Syndrome
  • De Quervain’s Thyroiditis
  • Diabetes
  • Follicular Thyroid Cancer
  • Gestational Diabetes
  • Goiters
  • Graves’ Disease
  • Growth Disorders
  • Growth Hormone Deficiency
  • Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis (Who’s this Hashimoto?)
  • Hurthle Cell Thyroid Cancer (Someone else’s name?)
  • Hyperglycemia
  • Hyperparathyroidism
  • Hyperthyroidism
  • Hypoglycemia
  • Hypoparathyroidism
  • Hypothyroidism
  • Low Testosterone
  • Medullary Thyroid Cancer
  • MEN 1
  • MEN 2A
  • MEN 2B
  • Menopause
  • Metabolic Syndrome
  • Obesity
  • Osteoporosis
  • Papillary Thyroid Cancer
  • Parathyroid Diseases (Can you even pronounce it?)
  • Pituitary Disorders
  • Pituitary Tumors
  • Polycystic Ovary Syndrome
  • Prediabetes
  • Reproduction
  • Silent Thyroiditis (If it’s silent, how will I know?)
  • Thyroid Cancer
  • Thyroid Diseases
  • Thyroid Nodules
  • Thyroiditis
  • Turner Syndrome
  • Type 1 Diabetes
  • Type 2 Diabetes

Bring in the Big Guns

This is where endocrinologists, rub their hands together…aha! “Let me get my hands on some of these”. But whoa, take a breath, and don’t assume you’ve got one or even all of these maladies. You could take endless tests and still get no answers. Because they are all related to how your hormones function, a good place to start might be to make an appointment with Dr. Stephen A. Goldstein MD, F.A.C.S. at Denver Hormone Health. Years of expertise and experience have made him one of the most skilled specialists in the endocrine system and the hormone replacement therapy that might be needed to correct it. No matter what you tell him, he cares. He listens and then with simple tests can tell if hormones could be the culprit. If they are, he then creates a plan tailored to take on what’s really going on in your body. (You can stop sweating and catastrophizing now.) His single goal is to get you feeling your very best.

Call now for an appointment.

Get on with life. And a great one, at that.