ADRENALS – What do they do?

Hey, it's Dr. A. Just want to answer another question that I got in regarding your adrenal glands. And so somebody wrote in and says, basically, I keep hearing about my adrenals, quote unquote. What are they? What do they do for me? And why are people interested in telling me about them? So I think that's a really good one. It's sort of a funny question too. Your adrenal glands are 2 glands that sit on top of each— one on top of each kidney, and they're a little small. They sort of look like almost like the kidney's wearing a little hat. That is the green— the suprarenal or adrenal glands. Now, embryologically, when you're being formed as an embryo, they actually form in 2 distinct parts, and they actually come from 2 different parts of development. So there's a middle part that is very neurological and retains the cell structures and histology of the nervous system largely, and then it sort of comes around and folds into the outer layer, which is called the cortex. The outside is usually called the cortex, and that's very glandular. And so you have a gland, the adrenal gland, There's a pair of them, which is really kind of 2 glands into one. So if you look at the first part that we talked about, the adrenal medulla, the middle part, right? What it does is it is made of this yellow chromaffin tissue, which is also the little pieces of it lining your aorta in the middle of your body, etc. But the chromaffin tissue in there, what it's specifically doing is making Some of your fight-or-flight hormones. So epinephrine, also known as adrenaline, and norepinephrine or noradrenaline. Now, the adrenal glands, the medulla makes about 80% epinephrine and about 20% norepinephrine. Norepinephrine is often thought of as a brain neurotransmitter, but it also does some work down here in the rest of your body. When you're having a fight-or-flight, so something scares you, you have to run away from, you know, a bear, an attacker, Or you're under a lot of stress or whatever, you release these immediate-use chemicals. So the adrenal medulla is all about immediate-use stress chemicals. What do they do for you? They are the fight or flight, and some— sometimes we say fight, flight, or freeze neurochemistry or chemistry. Adrenaline basically upregulates your heart rate. It lets your lungs open up and breathe Faster and better. So your heart not only is able to pump more blood more quickly, but your lungs are able to move more air in and out, which would be great if you're running away from a bear. And then the other thing that it does is that it neurologically affects things like your eyes. So your eyes are kind of focused far away, and it shuts down the need to have your digestive organs operating and stuff and shunts the blood out to your muscles. So if you have to fight or flight or whatever, you're ready for it. Now, the other thing that the epinephrine does when it's released is, if you think about this, it's all kind of tied together in human biology and other mammals too. When the epinephrine is released, it also goes and liberates substrates or little, you know, things that are needed for running away from bears. So you get more blood sugar, blood sugar goes up. Free fats in the bloodstream are increased so that your heart can metabolize them and your skeletal muscle can metabolize them too. Now, if you don't need the adrenaline release and you're just really stressed out or whatever, imagine if you don't have to run from a bear and you're sitting there, you're all stressed out, what's going to happen? All these changes still go on, right? So if you're really stressed out and you have nothing you can do about it, your heart's going to pump harder, your blood pressure is going to go up, your heart rate goes up. And if you keep doing that over and over, you're going to have, you know, long-term problems with it. Well, we talked about the medulla, which is more like neurochemistry, and then we've got the cortex on the outside. Well, the cortex comes in 3 layers, and there's 3 really cool Latin names for the layers, but we really don't need to get into that. You can look them up, it's easy enough. Just look up adrenal cortex and get more information you ever wanted. But what's it really do? Well, the 3 layers make Outside is a mineralocorticoid, also known as aldosterone primarily, which is a hormone that shifts your blood levels of sodium and potassium around primarily and helps with— it can help in the response to hemorrhaging, it can alter your blood pressure, it does all sorts of things. In the middle layer, you make cortisol, which is a relative structure of cortisone, right? Humans make more cortisol in this particular layer in your liver and convert it. Cortisol is called a glucocorticoid. So aldosterone, mineralocorticoid, because it manipulates mineral. So cortisol family manipulates glucose. Now, it's also your primary stress hormone. So cortisol does things like help you in the morning to wake up. Most of your cortisol is made in the morning. Cortisol wakes your brain up. At night you're supposed to have low cortisol, morning you're supposed to have high. Part of what wakes your brain up is actually the cortisol surge that you get in the morning. So if your cortisol levels are low, it can engender some fatigue. Cortisol levels are high, you may not sleep really well. If you've ever had to take steroids, exogenous steroids like prednisone or something for a disease state, you might notice you have trouble sleeping. Well, that's why. Your brain thinks it's It's like perpetually morning when you have the steroids around. So cortisol is really important. It's circadian. It's high in the morning, low at night. It helps wake your brain up. And at night when it tapers off, it and melatonin get together and help induce sleep. Cortisol by being low and melatonin by being high at night helps induce sleep. But also cortisol helps— it's called glucocorticoid because it can help, like, you know, like the adrenal medulla stress hormone, you know, epinephrine helps to raise blood sugar, cortisol can too. Now you think about it, cortisol is released naturally a little bit during the day in this sort of, you know, high in the morning, low at night thing, but under stress you're going to release more of these things. So aldosterone is the stress hormone, cortisol is stress hormone, and then the inner layer of the 3 layers— so you've got aldosterone, cortisol, and then the inner layer is Basically testosterone precursors. DHEA you've probably heard of, and then androstenedione, ASD. Both of these are made on the inner layer. And so sometimes you'll see if there's a lot of stress on the adrenal system, the cortisol initially may go up and then go down. And you may see under certain stress patterns that your DHEA may go up or down depending on the level of stress that the adrenals are under. Now we're going to do a separate Uh, YouTube video on cortisol and a little bit deeper into its biology, but basically your adrenals are there to help you throughout the day have a circadian rhythm with your corticoid hormones. They are there if you need to make some aldosterone to rebalance your electrolytes. They are there to provide backup levels of testosterone precursors to DHEA and ASD. And if you don't have your adrenals, you can die because without cortisol especially, you just will die. Now, they also, you need to know, are able to up and down regulate just like the adrenal medulla, the middle part. If you get stressed, you know, the bear is chasing you, it's going to release a lot of this epinephrine, norepinephrine. Same thing with the adrenal cortex, even though it's a separate part of the gland that's made differently in your embryology, They're all connected by their blood flow. So if you get stressed, stress hormones start to, you know, shoot around through your body, the cortex starts to overproduce as well. So people who are chronically stressed sometimes will develop high cortisol states, and that can throw off the blood sugar, push it up high. It can make you have trouble sleeping, can even affect healing and other things. And again, we'll go into cortisol a little deeper in the other YouTube video, but that's the idea with it. The adrenals are a very responsive set of glands, and so when you're— let's say you're just having a regular old day and everything's pretty fine and you're not under any undue stress, etc., there's no, you know, there's no psychic stress like, you know, bad boss or something, there's no bears around or whatever, good day. Your adrenals are basically going to make the appropriate amount of Corticoids in the morning and you'll live off those all day and they'll go down at night. And you may not make— you may not pump out much of any epinephrine or norepinephrine during the day. If you're under a lot of stress, you may go elevated in both of those areas, which again is a fine response to stress. The trouble that occurs is when we go too long with stressors. the stimulation of the corticoids and the epinephrine. You get too many stress hormones and you get stress hormone-induced disorders from that. Again, we'll talk about that in a separate YouTube video. Well, I'm Dr. A. Thank you for the question. Keep them coming. Like, share, subscribe, comment, all of those good things. Hit the notification bell. Really, really happy with all the new subscribers. Appreciate it, and I appreciate your feedback. Thanks again.