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Hormones as 2nd messengers to CNS impulses?

JohnBoy2000

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May 11, 2016
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I read about this some years ago, refreshed my memory through the wikipedia page more recently, but perhaps there's some with more refined hormonal vs nerve impulse/neurotransmitter signalling understanding among us?

It's contended "cellular function slows with age", it's not contended how or why this happens, but seems to reflect in physical appearance and other physiological factors.

My primary question is simply, hormonal implication as a result of CNS/neural impulses?
They work as 2nd messengers in that capacity?
How, why, effects of one on the other etc?

Pituitary seems to regulate most hormonal signalling in the body, being a gland located in the brain, obviously there's an association.

I can and will bring myself up to speed on the hormone activation and signalling vs neural action potentials and conventional neurotransmitter signalling, but again - if there's any poster who has the core/primary concepts of hormonal signalling down - care to extrapolate on those concepts here?


PS - example, dihydrotestosterone responsible for hair follicle contraction, hair thinning and loss, seems to approach with age - but this is all hormonal.

I'm almost certain it's associated on a more fundamental level with CNS/neural signalling/impulses, and has historically thought to be "genetic" - but of course as CNS impulses and signalling can dictate gene expression (epigenome), it seems likely that activation of hormonal activity like DHT which causes hair loss, is a 2nd messenger effect of CNS variation (potential gene expression variation) that comes with age - vs being some predisposed gene that expresses around ones 30's.

Anyways, bottom line, hormone transmission - anyone informed on this area of physiology?
 
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Hormone secretion occurs in response to specific biochemical signals from a wide range of regulatory systems. For instance, serum calcium concentration affects parathyroid hormone synthesis; blood sugar (serum glucose concentration) affects insulin synthesis; and because the outputs of the stomach and exocrine pancreas (the amounts of gastric juice and pancreatic juice) become the input of the small intestine, the small intestine secretes hormones to stimulate or inhibit the stomach and pancreas based on how busy it is. Regulation of hormone synthesis of gonadal hormones, adrenocortical hormones, and thyroid hormones often depends on complex sets of direct-influence and feedback interactions involving the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA), -gonadal (HPG), and -thyroid (HPT) axes.

Hypothalamus - obviously the brain/neural structure responsible for implicating hormonal secretion and activity.

i.e.
One of the most important functions of the hypothalamus is to link the nervous system to the endocrine system via the pituitary gland.

We could infer that pituitary/hormonal activity is a function of nervous system activity, specifically that which essentially "winds up" through the hypothalamus.
 
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