Pheromones and Hormone Therapy

Pheromones : Pheromones -- also called social hormones, sex attractants or external hormones -- are volatile chemical substances that one organism produces and releases to trigger a physiological or behavioural response in another organism of the same species. They are especially well studied in insects: some are signalling pheromones that enhance mating chances between the sexes or trigger a specific behavioural response, and social insects such as ants use signalling pheromones to mark food-source trails and warn of danger. In honeybee colonies, worker bees are kept in a sterile state by the anti-queen factor, a pheromone the queen produces that spreads among the workers and prevents their ovaries from maturing as long as the queen remains present in the hive; as colony size grows the pheromone becomes diluted, and a second queen may then be able to develop.

Hormone therapy / HT : Hormone therapy (HT) is the deliberate medical use of hormones in treatment, applied across a range of conditions -- pregnancy, menopause, osteoporosis, growth hormone deficiency, insulin resistance and cancer among them -- putting to clinical use the same hormone-receptor mechanisms this chapter has traced through the nervous and endocrine systems. …