The prostate is affected from up close—by the testes—and from long-distance—by the brain. Let’s begin at the top: The hypothalamus, located in the brain, makes a chemical messenger called LHRH, which is dispatched in signal pulses—like Morse code or flashes of light—to the nearby pituitary gland. These pulses tell the pituitary to transmit yet another chemical signal, called LH, which motivates the testes to make the male hormone testosterone.
Among other things, testosterone is responsible for secondary sex characteristics like post-puberty body hair and deepening of the voice, and for fertility. It is a major hormone that regulates the prostate. The adrenals also make some weak androgens; however, it’s questionable whether these adrenal androgens have a significant influence on the adult prostate.
Testosterone is important to the prostate, but not in its original form; it must be transformed to an active form. It turns out that testosterone is converted by an enzyme called 5-alpha-reductase to DHT. And DHT is the major androgen, or male hormone, inside the prostate cell.
Here’s how it works: Testosterone circulates in the blood. It enters cells in the prostate by diffusion, like water through a tea bag, and soon is transformed into DHT. DHT hooks up chemically with a specific protein, moves to the cellular seat of power—the nucleus—and quickly becomes a powerful force in the transmission of genetic information (DNA) from prostate cells.
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