Posts tagged women
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
Females Respond Better to Stress Because of Estrogen in the Brain, Animal Study Finds
The idea that females are more resilient than males in responding to stress is a popular view, and now University at Buffalo researchers have found a scientific explanation. The paper describing their embargoed study will be published July 9 online, in the high-impact journal, Molecular Psychiatry.
“We have examined the molecular mechanism underlying gender-specific effects of stress,” says senior author Zhen Yan, PhD, a professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics in the UB School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. “Previous studies have found that females are more resilient to chronic stress and now our research has found the reason why.”
The research shows that in rats exposed to repeated episodes of stress, females respond better than males because of the protective effect of estrogen.
In the UB study, young female rats exposed to one week of periodic physical restraint stress showed no impairment in their ability to remember and recognize objects they had previously been shown. In contrast, young males exposed to the same stress were impaired in their short-term memory.
An impairment in the ability to correctly remember a familiar object signifies some disturbance in the signaling ability of the glutamate receptor in the prefrontal cortex, the brain region that controls working memory, attention, decision-making, emotion and other high-level “executive” processes.
Last year, Yan and UB colleagues published in Neuron a paper showing that repeated stress results in loss of the glutamate receptor in the prefrontal cortex of young males.
The current paper shows that the glutamate receptor in the prefrontal cortex of stressed females is intact. The findings provide more support for a growing body of research demonstrating that the glutamate receptor is the molecular target of stress, which mediates the stress response.
The stressors used in the experiments mimic challenging and stressful, but not dangerous, experiences that humans face, such as those causing frustration and feelings of being under pressure, Yan says.
By manipulating the amount of estrogen produced in the brain, the UB researchers were able to make the males respond to stress more like females and the females respond more like males.
“When estrogen signaling in the brains of females was blocked, stress exhibited detrimental effects on them,” explains Yan. “When estrogen signaling was activated in males, the detrimental effects of stress were blocked.
“We still found the protective effect of estrogen in female rats whose ovaries were removed,” says Yan. “It suggests that it might be estrogen produced in the brain that protects against the detrimental effects of stress.”
In the current study, Yan and her colleagues found that the enzyme aromatase, which produces estradiol, an estrogen hormone, in the brain, is responsible for female stress resilience. They found that aromatase levels are significantly higher in the prefrontal cortex of female rats.
“If we could find compounds similar to estrogen that could be administered without causing hormonal side effects, they could prove to be a very effective treatment for stress-related problems in males,” she says.
She notes that while stress itself is not a psychiatric disorder, it can be a trigger for the development of psychiatric disorders in vulnerable individuals.
(Source: newswise.com)
Testosterone could combat dementia in women
In a new study, post-menopausal women on testosterone therapy showed a significant improvement in verbal learning and memory, offering a promising avenue for research into memory and ageing.
Led by Director of the Women’s Health Research Program at Monash University, Professor Susan Davis, and presented at ENDO 2103, the research is the first large, randomised, placebo-controlled investigation into the effects of testosterone on cognitive function in postmenopausal women.
Testosterone has been implicated as being important for brain function in men and these results indicate that it has a role in optimising learning and memory in women.
Dementia, which was estimated to affect more than 35 million people worldwide in 2010, is more common in women than men. There are no effective treatments to prevent memory decline.
In the study, 96 postmenopausal women recruited from the community were randomly allocated to receive a testosterone gel or a visually identical placebo gel to be applied to the skin. Participants underwent a comprehensive series of cognitive tests at the beginning of the study and 26 weeks later.
All women performed in the normal range for their age at the beginning of the trial. There was a statistically significant and clinically meaningful improvement in verbal learning and memory amongst the women using the testosterone gel after 26 weeks.
Professor Davis said the results indicated that testosterone played an important role in women’s health.
"Much of the research on testosterone in women to date has focused on sexual function. But testosterone has widespread effects in women, including, it appears, significant favourable effects on verbal learning and memory," Professor Davis said.
"Our findings provide compelling evidence for the conduct of larger clinical studies to further investigate the role of testosterone in cognitive function in women.
Androgen levels did increase in the cohort on testosterone therapy, but on average, remained in the normal female range. No negative side-effects of the therapy were observed.
Weight Loss Improves Memory and Alters Brain Activity in Overweight Women
Memory improves in older, overweight women after they lose weight by dieting, and their brain activity actually changes in the regions of the brain that are important for memory tasks, a new study finds. The results were presented at The Endocrine Society’s 95th Annual Meeting in San Francisco.
(Image: Corbis)
“Our findings suggest that obesity-associated impairments in memory function are reversible, adding incentive for weight loss,” said lead author Andreas Pettersson, MD, a PhD student at Umea University, Umea, Sweden.
Previous research has shown that obese people have impaired episodic memory, the memory of events that happen throughout one’s life.
Pettersson and co-workers performed their study to determine whether weight loss would improve memory and whether improved memory correlated with changes in relevant brain activity. A special type of brain imaging called functional magnetic resonance imaging (functional MRI) allowed them to see brain activity while the subjects performed a memory test.
The researchers randomly assigned 20 overweight, postmenopausal women (average age, 61) to one of two healthy weight loss diets for six months. Nine women used the Paleolithic diet, also called the Caveman diet, which was composed of 30 percent protein; 30 percent carbohydrates, or “carbs”; and 40 percent unsaturated fats. The other 11 women followed the Nordic Nutrition Recommendations of a diet containing 15 percent protein, 55 percent carbs and 30 percent fats.
Before and after the diet, the investigators measured the women’s body mass index (BMI, a measure of weight and height) and body fat composition. They also tested the subjects’ episodic memory by instructing them to memorize unknown pairs of faces and names presented on a screen during functional MRI. The name for this process of creating new memory is “encoding.” Later, the women again saw the facial images along with three letters. Their memory retrieval task, during functional MRI, was to indicate the correct letter that corresponded to the first letter of the name linked to the face.
Because the two dietary groups did not differ in body measurements and functional MRI data, their data were combined and analyzed as one group. The group’s average BMI decreased from 32.1 before the diet to 29.2 (below the cutoff for obesity) after six months of dieting, and their average weight dropped from 188.9 pounds (85 kilograms) to 171.3 pounds (77.1 kilograms), the authors reported. This study was part of a larger, diet-focused study funded by the Swedish Research Council and the Swedish Heart-Lung Foundation.
Memory performance improved after weight loss, and Pettersson said the brain-activity pattern during memory testing reflected this improvement. After weight loss, brain activity reportedly increased during memory encoding in the brain regions that are important for identification and matching of faces. In addition, brain activity decreased after weight loss in the regions that are associated with retrieval of episodic memories, which Pettersson said indicates more efficient retrieval.
“The altered brain activity after weight loss suggests that the brain becomes more active while storing new memories and therefore needs fewer brain resources to recollect stored information,” he said.
(Source: newswise.com)
Women’s, men’s brains respond differently to hungry infant’s cries
Researchers at the National Institutes of Health have uncovered firm evidence for what many mothers have long suspected: women’s brains appear to be hard-wired to respond to the cries of a hungry infant.
Researchers asked men and women to let their minds wander, then played a recording of white noise interspersed with the sounds of an infant crying. Brain scans showed that, in the women, patterns of brain activity abruptly switched to an attentive mode when they heard the infant cries, whereas the men’s brains remained in the resting state.
“Previous studies have shown that, on an emotional level, men and women respond differently to the sound of an infant crying,” said study co-author Marc H. Bornstein, Ph.D., head of the Child and Family Research Section of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), the institute that conducted the study. “Our findings indicate that men and women show marked differences in terms of attention as well.”
The earlier studies showed that women are more likely than men to feel sympathy when they hear an infant cry, and are more likely to want to care for the infant.
Dr. Bornstein collaborated with Nicola De Pisapia, Ph.D., Paola Rigo, Simona DeFalco, Ph.D., and Paola Venuti, Ph.D., all of the Observation, Diagnosis and Education Lab at the University of Trento, Italy, and Gianluca Esposito, Ph.D., of RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Japan.
Their findings appear in NeuroReport.
Previous studies have shown differences in patterns of brain activity between when an individual’s attention is focused and when the mind wanders. The pattern of unfocused activity is referred to as default mode, Dr. Bornstein explained. When individuals focus on something in particular, their brains disengage from the default mode and activate other brain networks.
For about 15 minutes, participants listened to white noise interspersed with short periods of silence and with the sounds of a hungry infant crying. The patterns of their brain activity were recorded by a technique known as functional magnetic resonance imaging.
The researchers analyzed brain images from 18 adults, parents and nonparents. The researchers found that when participants listened to the typical infant cries, the brain activity of men and women differed. When hearing a hungry infant cry, women’s brains were more likely to disengage from the default mode, indicating that they focused their attention on the crying. In contrast, the men’s brains tended to remain in default mode during the infant crying sounds. The brain patterns did not vary between parents and nonparents.
Infants cry because they are distressed, hungry, or in need of physical closeness. To determine if adults respond differently to different types of cries, the researchers also played the cries of infants who were later diagnosed with autism. An earlier study of Dr. Bornstein and the same Italian group found that the cries of infants who develop ASD tend to be higher pitched than those of other infants and that the pauses between cries are shorter. In this other study, both men and women tended to interrupt their mind wandering when they heard these cries.
“Adults have many-layered responses to the things infants do,” said Dr. Bornstein. “Determining whether these responses differ between men and women, by age, and by parental status, helps us understand instincts for caring for the very young.”
In an earlier study, Dr. Bornstein and his colleagues found that patterns of brain activity in men and women also changed when they viewed an image of an infant face and that the patterns were indicative of a predisposition to relate to and care for the infant.
Such studies documenting the brain activity patterns of adults represent first stages of research in neuroscience understanding how adults relate to and care for infants, Dr. Bornstein explained. It is possible that not all adults exhibit the brain patterns seen in these studies.
Men are traditionally thought to have more problems in understanding women compared to understanding other men, though evidence supporting this assumption remains sparse. Recently, it has been shown, however, that meńs problems in recognizing women’s emotions could be linked to difficulties in extracting the relevant information from the eye region, which remain one of the richest sources of social information for the attribution of mental states to others. To determine possible differences in the neural correlates underlying emotion recognition from female, as compared to male eyes, a modified version of the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test in combination with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was applied to a sample of 22 participants. We found that men actually had twice as many problems in recognizing emotions from female as compared to male eyes, and that these problems were particularly associated with a lack of activation in limbic regions of the brain (including the hippocampus and the rostral anterior cingulate cortex). Moreover, men revealed heightened activation of the right amygdala to male stimuli regardless of condition (sex vs. emotion recognition). Thus, our findings highlight the function of the amygdala in the affective component of theory of mind (ToM) and in empathy, and provide further evidence that men are substantially less able to infer mental states expressed by women, which may be accompanied by sex-specific differences in amygdala activity.
Can you feel my pain? Middle-aged women sure can
Looking for someone to feel your pain? Talk to a woman in her 50s.
According to a new study of more than 75,000 adults, women in that age group are more empathic than men of the same age and than younger or older people.
"Overall, late middle-aged adults were higher in both of the aspects of empathy that we measured," said Sara Konrath, assistant research professor at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research and co-author of an article on age and empathy forthcoming in the Journals of Gerontology: Psychological and Social Sciences.
"They reported that they were more likely to react emotionally to the experiences of others, and they were also more likely to try to understand how things looked from the perspective of others."
Konrath and colleagues Ed O’Brien and Linda Hagen of U-M and Daniel Grühn of North Carolina State University analyzed data on empathy from three separate large samples of American adults, two of which were taken from the nationally representative General Social Survey.
They found consistent evidence of an inverted U-shaped pattern of empathy across the adult life span, with younger and older adults reporting less empathy and middle-aged adults reporting more.
According to O’Brien, U-M doctoral student in social psychology, this pattern may result because increasing levels of cognitive abilities and experience improve emotional functioning during the first part of the adult life span, while cognitive declines diminish emotional functioning in the second half.
But more research is needed in order to understand whether this pattern is really the result of an individual’s age, or whether it is a generational effect reflecting the socialization of adults who are now in late middle age.
Vitamin D Tied to Women’s Cognitive Performance
Two new studies appearing in the Journals of Gerontology Series A: Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences show that vitamin D may be a vital component for the cognitive health of women as they age.
Higher vitamin D dietary intake is associated with a lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, according to research conducted by a team led by Cedric Annweiler, MD, PhD, at the Angers University Hospital in France.
Similarly, investigators led by Yelena Slinin, MD, MS, at the VA Medical Center in Minneapolis found that low vitamin D levels among older women are associated with higher odds of global cognitive impairment and a higher risk of global cognitive decline.
Slinin’s group based its analysis on 6,257 community-dwelling older women who had vitamin D levels measured during the Study of Osteopathic Fractures and whose cognitive function was tested by the Mini-Mental State Examination and/or Trail Making Test Part B.
Very low levels of vitamin D (less than 10 nanograms per milliliter of blood serum) among older women were associated with higher odds of global cognitive impairment at baseline, and low vitamin D levels (less than 20 nanograms per milliliter) among cognitively-impaired women were associated with a higher risk of incident global cognitive decline, as measured by performance on the Mini-Mental State Examination.
Annweieler’s team’s findings were based on data from 498 community-dwelling women who participated in the Toulouse cohort of the Epidemiology of Osteoporosis study.
Among this population, women who developed Alzheimer’s disease had lower baseline vitamin D intakes (an average of 50.3 micrograms per week) than those who developed other dementias (an average of 63.6 micrograms per week) or no dementia at all (an average of 59.0 micrograms per week).
These reports follow an article published in the Journals of Gerontology Series A earlier this year that found that both men and women who don’t get enough vitamin D — either from diet, supplements, or sun exposure — may be at increased risk of developing mobility limitations and disability.
(Photo Credit: Paul Burns / Getty Images)
After nearly 10 years of follow-up of study participants who experienced migraines and who had brain lesions indentified via magnetic resonance imaging, women with migraines had a higher prevalence and greater increase of deep white matter hyperintensities (brain lesions) than women without migraines, although the number, frequency, and severity of migraines were not associated with lesion progression, according to a study appearing in the November 14 issue of JAMA. Also, increase in deep white matter hyperintensity volume was not significantly associated with poorer cognitive performance at follow-up.
Migraine affects up to 15 percent of the general population. “A previous cross-sectional study showed an association of migraine with a higher prevalence of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)-measured ischemic lesions in the brain,” according to background information in the article. White matter hyperintensities are associated with atherosclerotic disease risk factors, increased risk of ischemic stroke, and cognitive decline.
Women’s body talk: perception stronger than reality?
How women think their friends feel about their bodies influences their own body concerns, according to a new study by Dr. Louise Wasylkiw and Molly Williamson from Mount Alison University in Canada. Their work, which examines the role of friends in young women’s body concerns, is published online in Springer’s journal Sex Roles.
Research shows that friends influence how girls and women view and judge their own body weight, shape and size. What Wasylkiw and Williamson’s work sheds light on, is how much of a young woman’s body concerns are shaped by her perceptions of peers’ concerns with their own body versus her peers’ actual body concerns.
![Wikipedia gets overdue makeover to give recognition to science’s female pioneers
They are some of the most important names in modern science, pioneers in their fields. But, unless you work in academia, it is unlikely that you will have ever heard of them.
All that is set to change, though, as the Royal Society hosts a mass “edit-a-thon” to improve the Wikipedia profiles of leading female scientists who have been ignored and overlooked by the online encyclopedia’s male-dominated army of contributors.
The scientific body, founded in 1660, has drawn up a list of prominent women who it believes deserve greater prominence on the site. Volunteers are invited to scour the society’s archives for information which can be used to improve the women’s Wikipedia entries, allowing internet users around the world to learn about their work.
Organisers believe that a perceived under-representation of women on the site is emblematic of a wider ignorance of the contributions of women to science. “I was completely astonished that the bias exists,” said Professor Uta Frith, the University College London neuroscientist leading the project.
"This issue pervades all age groups. I and some colleagues took a quiz [on female scientists] and it was embarrassing how few even we knew. Most of the names we could get, but we knew very little about some of the most stunning people. Everybody needs to be educated; the knowledge is not there, it is not cultivated."
Dr Patricia Fara, Senior Tutor at Clare College, Cambridge University, said it was important to raise the issue of undervaluing women in science. “I am against positive discrimination in the long term but this is important in the short term,” she said.](http://41.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mc54ogkNsw1rog5d1o1_500.jpg)
Wikipedia gets overdue makeover to give recognition to science’s female pioneers
They are some of the most important names in modern science, pioneers in their fields. But, unless you work in academia, it is unlikely that you will have ever heard of them.
All that is set to change, though, as the Royal Society hosts a mass “edit-a-thon” to improve the Wikipedia profiles of leading female scientists who have been ignored and overlooked by the online encyclopedia’s male-dominated army of contributors.
The scientific body, founded in 1660, has drawn up a list of prominent women who it believes deserve greater prominence on the site. Volunteers are invited to scour the society’s archives for information which can be used to improve the women’s Wikipedia entries, allowing internet users around the world to learn about their work.
Organisers believe that a perceived under-representation of women on the site is emblematic of a wider ignorance of the contributions of women to science. “I was completely astonished that the bias exists,” said Professor Uta Frith, the University College London neuroscientist leading the project.
"This issue pervades all age groups. I and some colleagues took a quiz [on female scientists] and it was embarrassing how few even we knew. Most of the names we could get, but we knew very little about some of the most stunning people. Everybody needs to be educated; the knowledge is not there, it is not cultivated."
Dr Patricia Fara, Senior Tutor at Clare College, Cambridge University, said it was important to raise the issue of undervaluing women in science. “I am against positive discrimination in the long term but this is important in the short term,” she said.