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Estrogen allows women to respond better to stress than men: Study
In the battle of the sexes, a new study places females in the lead — concluding that they respond better to repeated stress thanks to estrogen.
“It’s kind of a popular view that males and females respond differently to stress,” said University at Buffalo neuroscientist and study co-author Zhen Yan. “Our study offers the molecular mechanism.” Yan’s group found that young female rats stressed out by a week of periodic physical restraint showed no impairment in their ability to remember and recognize objects they had been shown a few hours earlier. Young males exposed to the same stress conditions fared worse on the short-term memory test. But when the researchers manipulated estrogen levels in the brain, female rats respond to stress like males and vice-versa.
Yan said. In 2012, the team reported that male rats exposed to repeated stress lost glutamate receptors in their prefrontal cortex region, resulting in impaired performance on a number of memory tasks. When the researchers later examined female rats as a control, they saw that females exposed to the same stress showed enhanced cognition and memory. Other animal studies have produced similar results.
It’s still not clear exactly how estrogen protects against stress — for example, whether estrogen is affecting stress hormone release or directly affecting the glutamate receptor. Yan said her group plans to pursue this question in future research. The study offers a scientific explanation for what has been mainly anecdotal evidence of women being better able to cope with stress than their male counterparts, Yan said. “It’s not that there’s no reason,” she said, adding that the study might also shed light on sex differences in mental disorders.
Yan cautioned that her group’s results are based on rat studies. Still, the findings may hold relevance for humans since many cellular functions are conserved between the two species, she said.
via Blogger http://chiropractic-lane.blogspot.com/2013/08/estrogen-allows-women-to-respond-better.html
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