Too Much Estrogen in Your House? Men, Look at Yourselves
A friend just had a third daughter. I asked how he's doing with all that estrogen in the house. He rolled his eyes. But scientists have recently learned that he's contributing, too. According to Gina Kolata, "Estrogen, the female sex hormone, turns out to play a much bigger role in men’s bodies than previously thought, and falling levels contribute to their expanding waistlines just as they do in women’s." Until recently, she notes, testosterone deficiency was considered "nearly the sole reason that men undergo the familiar physical complaints of midlife." A recent study put the end to that way of thinking. “Some of the symptoms routinely attributed to testosterone deficiency are actually partially or almost exclusively caused by the decline in estrogens,” Kolata quotes Dr. Joel Finkelstein, an endocrinologist at Harvard Medical School and the study’s lead author, from a news release put out on Wednesday. "While dwin...