Side effects of melatonin for women

Melatonin, as the name suggests, is a drug that can remove dark spots and whiten the skin. It also has the function of adjusting jet lag. However, long-term use of melatonin will reduce body hormones and have an impact on the body. The side effects of melatonin on women may cause a decrease in estrogen and progesterone levels, leading to infertility. Let’s take a closer look at the chemical composition and side effects of melatonin so that you can understand it clearly before using it.

Melatonin (MT) is named because it can whiten the skin and is one of the hormones secreted by the pineal gland in the brain. Melatonin belongs to the indole heterocyclic compound, its chemical name is N-acetyl-5-methoxytryptamine, also known as pinealogen, melatonin, and melatonin. After melatonin is synthesized, it is stored in the pineal gland, and sympathetic nerve excitement controls pineal cells to release melatonin into the blood. The secretion of melatonin has a clear circadian rhythm, with secretion inhibited during the day and active at night. Melatonin can inhibit the hypothalamus-pituitary-gonad axis, reduce the levels of gonadotropin-releasing hormone, gonadotropin, luteinizing hormone and follicular estrogen, and can directly act on the gonads to reduce the levels of androgens, estrogens and progesterone. In addition, MT has powerful neuroendocrine immunomodulatory activity and free radical scavenging antioxidant capacity, and may become a new method and approach for antiviral treatment. MT is ultimately metabolized in the liver, and damage to liver cells can affect the level of MT in the body.

1. Physiological Function

Improve sleep (dosage 0.1~0.3mg), shorten the time of waking up before bedtime and the time of falling asleep, improve sleep quality, significantly reduce the number of awakenings during sleep, shorten the light sleep stage, prolong the deep sleep stage, and reduce the awakening threshold the next morning. It has a strong function of adjusting time difference.

2. Side Effects

The melatonin fever has long since subsided. Not long after the melatonin craze began, experts from the US Department of Health issued a warning at a special seminar: taking it arbitrarily and indiscriminately could be dangerous. A researcher said that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration regards melatonin as a food supplement, so it is not listed as a drug, but the dosage of melatonin products on the market is too high, so some can cause hypothermia, release too much prolactin leading to infertility, and have the side effect of reducing male sexual desire. Others, such as the National Institute of Nutrition and Food, also emphasize that it must be used under the guidance of a doctor and in low doses to avoid danger.

Among European countries, Germany has the strictest regulation on melatonin. So far, Germany does not allow melatonin tablets for controlling sleep to be registered as drugs because the function of melatonin is still unclear.

Germany was the first country to conduct research linking the pineal gland, melatonin and reproductive function. German doctors discovered that a boy had precocious puberty and also found a tumor in the boy's pineal gland, which had destroyed normal tissue. It was precisely because of the destruction of the pineal gland that the boy experienced precocious puberty. This doctor was the first to propose the concept that the pineal gland inhibits gonadal development. Since then, people have also proved the role of melatonin secreted by the pineal gland through animal experiments. Injecting melatonin into animals will cause many anti-reproductive phenomena, such as delaying the sexual maturity of immature animals and inhibiting the animals' spontaneous ovulation and estrus response. Injecting rabbits with melatonin not only makes the reproductive organs of both sexes smaller than normal and their bodies shorter, but also causes the degeneration of ovarian follicles in female rabbits, reduction of uterine muscles, and degeneration of sperm cells in the seminiferous tubules of male rabbits. If the injections are continued for 6 months, both males and females will lose their reproductive ability. Therefore, some researchers have concluded that melatonin plays a significant role in inhibiting reproductive function.