Recently I went to the doctors and had my blood tested. This has gotten me to think about hormone related things. One thing that I was thinking about was how body builders take steroids and this inadvertently raises their estrogen. It’s my understanding that if the cycle is long enough, that the raise in estrogen becomes permanent.
That said, is the reverse true? Say someone mega-doses with estrogen for, say, six months, would their testosterone shoot through the roof and be more or less permanent?
First of all, when people talk about body builders using “steroids”, they’re referring to androgens (male hormones) like testosterone and not the “steroids” that doctors often use which are an entirely different class (called glucocorticoids, of which prednisone is a prime example).
Androgens can be converted to estrogens in fat tissue. This is one of the reasons that men/boys who use androgens (“steroids”) can develop some breast enlargement. Some portion of the androgen they take gets transformed into estrogen. It also explains, in part, why women who are obese tend to have less osteoporosis as they age, i.e. their estrogen levels were higher than they would have been otherwise (by virtue of their fat tissue producing estrogen from androgens they had), with estrogens helping to maintain bone and prevent osteoporosis. Conversely, obese women have higher rates of cancers of estrogen-dependent tissues such as breast and uterus i.e. where even the normal tissues are ‘designed’ to grow in response to estrogen.
Irrelevant to your question, but possibly of interest to any parents of young boys out there, is the observation that boys often develop (transient) breast enlargement as they enter puberty. This is because as the boy begins to make male hormones in quantity, the first thing to happen is that a lot of those male hormones get converted to estrogen in and by the boy’s fat tissue. It’s only later, as the boy’s male hormone production revs up to full speed that the effect of this fat tissue conversion of androgens into estrogens becomes less significant (and ultimately is overwhelmed by the offsetting effect of androgens made in the testes). You can see, though, why obese boys are more likely to experience early-puberty-associated breast enlargement (and sometimes have breast enlargement independent of puberty).
In any case, the rise in estrogen levels that can follow from the (illicit) use of androgens (“steroids”) is not permanent. That being said, some of the estrogen-induced effects (e.g. breast enlargement) can take a long time to disappear.
Finally, and as another aside, fat tissue can also transform inactive or minimally active androgens into more potent forms. This may explain, in part, why obese women can suffer from unwanted (male distribution) hair growth.