If you listen to all the public press, you might get the impression that the only use of melatonin is to keep your sleep patterns functioning properly. But when you realize how the hormone actually functions in the human body when it occurs naturally, the implications of melatonin effects on other bodily systems become much more interesting and medically promising. While it’s true that melatonin is a hormone that helps to regulate sleep rhythms, it also plays a very large role in the reproductive system, and it might have much more significant effects in that realm in the future.
The most well-known melatonin effect of course has to do with sleep. Melatonin is actually the hormone that maintains your body’s circadian rhythms, which are the systems that prompt you to fall asleep and wake up. When it gets dark outside, your body releases more melatonin from the pineal gland, encouraging sleep, while daylight results in a reduction in melatonin release, meaning you are more likely to be awake. These rhythms can be disrupted by working shifts, crossing many time zones in a short time span, or even poor vision. Yet these disruptions are a result of melatonin actually working the way it’s supposed to, trying to make you sleep when it’s dark and be awake in the light.
But melatonin isn’t just about disturbances of sleep. It’s also one of the hormones that triggers a women’s menstrual cycle and helps determine what sorts of cycles she’ll have throughout her life. And there’s a growing body of information that suggests that a lack of proper levels of melatonin plays a role in certain breast and prostate cancers. So melatonin effects are far reaching, going well beyond controlling sleep, and extending into some of the most crucial bodily systems of all.
A few of the melatonin effects on the reproductive system suggest that hormone supplements might eventually be used to help reduce the size of prostate or breast tumors. At the moment, because long term side effects aren’t known, melatonin is only recommended to be used for a short time to help with sleep issues during menopause. A great deal of study must still be done to test the ultimate efficacy of this hormone if used for either of these purposes. But the few studies that have been done so far, both in the realm of sleep and especially addressing these cancers, seem very promising.