hello everyone and welcome back to our fourth and final video for the female reproductive cycle or the end of our series here we've gone through this journey with period cramps ovulation and even fertilization and now we're gonna wrap it up into this nice little package because it's nice to review everything and put it together and finalize it and as a little bit of a bonus we'll go over some differences in hormone levels in men versus women to do this we have a whole bunch of charts that we're going to use on the whiteboard so to the whiteboard [Music] so welcome to the whiteboard session this was really helpful for me as a student to see all of the charts side by side or on top of each other to kind of wrap my head around this whole female reproductive cycle because there's a lot of things going on simultaneously now one thing that all the charts have in common is day 1 to 28 so all of them are going on with that 28 day cycle that we've been talking about the top chart is going over changes in endometrial thickness the other one is going over follicle stimulating hormone and luteinizing hormone in their varying levels throughout the 28 days same with estrogen and progesterone their levels throughout the 28 days so let's start with changes in endometrial thickness you can see at the beginning on the first three to five days you're going to have the decrease or the thinning out of the endometrium that's associated with essentially menstruation the bleeding the period cramps all the not so fun stuff that women get to deal with and that was initiated by what happened in the previous cycle so the previous cycle if an egg is not fertilized estrogen and progesterone levels go down which essentially kind of stimulates this next step of luteinizing and follicle stimulating hormone have a little boost right there that you can see and that's what essentially initiates this first part of the next cycle let's clear out the endometrium of the uterus and start over again now what else is happening with this down through here this initial boost remember caused those primordial follicles those most immature follicles caused a handful of them we mentioned 6 to 12 to become primary follicles and during that phase those primary follicles start secreting estrogen and the estrogen levels spike up now the estrogen levels as we mentioned before are going to cause the uterus to start building back up again which is really important for potential implantation of a fertilized egg earlier i did mention there was something else that estrogen could be involved in and estrogen levels spiking also are involved with increased libido or increased sex drive would probably make a little bit of sense for a woman to have a little bit of an increased libido a sec or sex drive right before ovulation you know so maybe you know she might overlook that her mate might be less attractive or that you know during that time he might actually look more attractive he might have forgot to do the dishes or mow the lawn and normally she wouldn't overlook that stuff but because of this surge of estrogen that other stuff's not as important because there's this egg inside screaming i need to be fertilized let's move on so coming back to our wonderful chart here we had that spike in estrogen we have those primary follicles developing but remember we don't want six to twelve babies so only one of them typically actually matures fully and that becomes the dominant follicle that moves to the edge of the ovary and awaits for that big spike of luteinizing hormone that luteinizing hormone causes the follicle to rupture the egg moves out of the ovary and causes the next phase which is the second half was the luteal phase if you remember now that big spike of luteinizing hormone converted the follicle that ruptured out the ovary i'm sorry ruptured out the egg to become the corpus luteum that corpus luteum is now still inside the ovary was the follicle became the corpus luteum and it is now secreting high amounts of progesterone yes secrete some more estrogen but a real big spike in progesterone which again just starts to build up the inside lining of the uterus for potential implantation so hopefully that kind of puts everything together for you in a nice little package there's one other thing i just wanted to mention over here there's a lot of spikes in hormones that women have to deal with on a 28-day cycle and so i wanted to kind of do this comparison of men versus women often you hear like testosterone versus estrogen those are pretty comparable like hormones when you're comparing the genders and so one of the interesting thing is that we'll do this with men this is a little bit of a different chart 0 12 50 these are these are going to be in years and i got years down here so let's use testosterone and men for an example essentially from 0 to 12 there's hardly any testosterone virtually none and you have this and then at age 12 puberty and then the testosterone levels tend to peak and but then they really start to taper down later in life and death okay so pretty steady over the time yes it does fluctuate throughout the day per se but it's not this we're not getting this huge huge spike throughout say a monthly cycle now with women we compare estrogen we have 0 to 12 here about from that time there's hardly much at all there's hardly any at all and then we go to puberty and then we do this i'm not finished a little more menopause death sorry death was a little bit morbid but quite the comparison if you think about it and i don't do this you know necessarily to poke fun or anything like that this is very serious science stuff of course we would never poke fun at that stuff but this should give us a little bit of empathy for all the hormone fluctuations that women have to go through and it's all in the name of reproduction thanks for watching you guys we really appreciate your support please subscribe ring the bell so you know when we go live 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