Urine can be used in the production of HRT and hormonal fertility treatments, according to Professor Luke O’Neill.

Hormone replacement therapy (HRT) is often used to treat symptoms of menopause in women.

“There’s hormones in urine, so sometimes oestrogens end up in urine,” Prof O’Neill told the Show Me the Science podcast.

“Now, this turned out to be very useful because for HRT, you use oestrogens, and you’re repleting the oestrogens in women who have gone through the menopause, and you’re boosting oestrogen levels by taking it.

“Guess where they were purifying the oestrogen from? Horse urine.

“A big source of HRT, even to this very day, is the purification of oestrogens that ended up in the horse urine, and now it’s available for HRT.”

HRT tablets.

Urine can also be used to purify hormones that boost fertility, known as gonadotrophins.

“A really interesting aspect to this was companies that were making gonadotrophins, they were purifying it from urine,” Prof O’Neill said.

“Now, guess where they got the urine? From nuns, strangely; there’s a fact for you.

“There were nuns in Italy who were giving up their urine to allow gonadotrophins to be purified to increase fertility.

“Of course, a big thing about Catholicism is the birth rate, and this is a way to do this, and it’s very peculiar that nuns were used as a source of urine.

“In fact, when that was going on back in the 80s, a collaborator of mine was also purifying other proteins from urine and various other proteins were ending up in urine, and one was a thing called the soluble TNF receptor.”

According to Prof O’Neill, TNF is an key factor in the inflammatory process which can cause many of the symptoms of conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis.

Main image: Luke O'Neill (L), HRT (R).