Hormones To The Max

Even before conception your hormones work together to create a good environment for your baby,

- Shanda Luyt

AS SOON AS the egg and sperm cell meet, these chemical messengers fire up to ensure that the right things happen at the right time. There are unpleasant side effects: Your emotions seesaw, there’s a furnace in your chest and those pimples you last saw as a teen are back. But there are also lovely surprises: those two peanuts you smuggled under your shirt before are now proper boobs bursting out of your bra. All these changes are the result of more than 30 hormones coursing through your body. We look at a few.

HCG

The pregnancy alarm One of the first hormones to arrive has the intimidatingly long name of human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG), but it’s also known as the pregnancy hormone. This hormone is only present during pregnancy, so it’s used for pregnancy tests. It occurs in your blood and urine. So whether you use a home pregnancy test or get a doctor to take blood – if there’s hCG, you’re pregnant!

Just a few days after the fertilised egg has burrowed into the uterine lining, the brand-new placenta starts producing hCG. The amount of hCG increases incredibly quickly and reaches a peak at day seventy. Thereafter, the level decreases, and the hormone then keeps a low profile for the rest of your pregnancy.

The most important function of hCG is to ensure that the steroid hormones oestrogen and progesterone continue to be produced. Without hCG, your progesterone level will decrease again and you’ll menstruate.

As the placenta becomes more mature and is able to take over the production of oestrogen and progesterone itself, hCG production decreases.