Links for Keyword: Hormones & Behavior

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NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro talks with Dr. Randi Hutter Epstein about her new book Aroused, which tells the story of the scientific quest to understand human hormones. LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: What do sleep, sex, insulin, mood and hunger have in common? Well, they're all controlled by hormones. But just a century ago, the power of our chemical messengers was barely understood. A new book by Dr. Randi Hutter Epstein called "Aroused" tells the stories of the scientists who work to explore and explain our hormones. Dr. Epstein joins us now from our New York bureau. Welcome to the program. RANDI HUTTER EPSTEIN: Thanks for having me. GARCIA-NAVARRO: The book is organized around stories from key moments in hormone research. And I have to say, many of the studies they were doing in the early days were pretty gruesome. EPSTEIN: When we say study, we tend now to think of the randomised clinical controlled trial. You know, you have one sample here. You compare it to another. When they were doing studies, they were doing sort of weird experiments on people and dogs and all kind of things. So there was Harvey Cushing. He was one of the first people to talk about that pituitary tumors can really muck you up and like send a lot of hormones awry. But here's what he tried to do that didn't work out that's kind of a wacky experiment. He had a 48-year-old man that had a pituitary tumor that was making him have double vision and headaches and other endocrine issues. And Harvey Cushing thought, what if we take a nice, healthy pituitary of a baby that just died if there is a newborn that didn't make it and just implant that in this old man, and then we just revive him and he'd be back to normal. Newspapers got a hold of it, as media tends to do. And there were wonderful headlines like baby brain, you know, broken brain fixed by baby. And it went wild in terms of, wow, we can now cure broken, old brains. And, spoiler alert, let's just say that we don't replace baby pituitary glands into grownups when they have pituitary tumors anymore.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 5: Hormones and the Brain; Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex; Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 25168 - Posted: 07.03.2018

Erika Engelhaupt The first scientific experiment on hormones took an approach that sounds unscientific: lopping off roosters’ testicles. It was 1848, and Dr. Arnold Berthold castrated two of his backyard roosters. The cocks’ red combs faded and shrank, and the birds stopped chasing hens. Then things got really weird. The doctor castrated two more roosters and implanted a testicle from each into the other’s abdomen. As Randi Hutter Epstein writes in a new book, each rooster “had nothing between his drumsticks but a lone testicle in his gut — yet he turned back into a full-fledged hen-chaser, red comb and all.” It was the first glimpse that certain body parts must produce internal secretions, as hormones were first known, and that these substances — and not just nerves — were important to the body’s control systems. Today, we know that hormones are chemical messengers shaping everything from sex and development to sleep, stress, mood, metabolism and behavior. Yet few of us know much about these powerful substances coursing through our bodies. That ignorance makes Aroused — titled for the Greek meaning of the word hormone — an invaluable guide. Epstein, a medical writer and M.D., tells the history of hormone research from that first rooster experiment, but cleverly moves back and forth through time, avoiding any hint of dry recitation. She explores the scientists who discovered and deciphered the effects of important hormones, as well as the personal stories of how people’s lives have been profoundly changed by these chemicals. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 5: Hormones and the Brain; Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex; Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 25141 - Posted: 06.26.2018

By Randi Hutter Epstein My son Jack was born in London a month before his due date. The pediatrician said he was fine and we could go home. A few minutes later another doctor came in and asked to draw blood to try to figure out why Jack was premature. I refused, because we had already been given the go-ahead to leave. I heard the doctor tell the nurses to mark in my medical record, “Mother refuses treatment for her son.” “I’m not refusing treatment! I’m refusing a needless test!” I said from my bed. To which she mumbled, “Write down, ‘Mother is hormonal.’” And so began my rant. I stormed out of my room, dressed only in my husband’s white T-shirt and nestling my 12-hour-old son to my chest, and hollered after the fleeing doctor, “I am not hormonal!” The truth is I was hormonal. I had just given birth, so my progesterone (the hormone that maintained my pregnancy) had plummeted and my oxytocin (the hormone that squeezed my uterus to get the baby out, got the milk flowing and fostered mother-baby bonding) had skyrocketed. But that’s not what the doctor meant when she used the word “hormonal.” She meant I was a woman going off the rails. In 1939, James E. King, the president of the American Association of Obstetricians, Gynecologists and Abdominal Surgeons, devoted part of his presidential address to hormones and women’s craziness, or as he called it, their “peculiarities” and “inconsistencies.” He said hormone therapy, which was brand new at the time, would not only treat conditions like menstrual irregularities and infertility but would also help women manage their emotions and make them prettier (estrogen would supposedly bring back aging women’s youthful splendor). Then he concluded with this snide remark: “Will she, as some timid souls fear, mentally and physically dominate and enslave us as we in the past enslaved her? Probably not; so long as she is controlled by her reproductive glands, she will remain basically the same lovable and gracious homemaker.” © 2018 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 5: Hormones and the Brain; Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex; Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 25057 - Posted: 06.05.2018

By Kerry Grens Neena Schwartz, a reproductive biologist at Northwestern University who discovered the hormone inhibin and its role in the regulation of reproductive cycles, died this month (April 15). She was 91. “She was a tremendous scientist, a pioneer for women in the sciences, and a leader in our discipline of endocrinology,” Teresa Woodruff and Kelly Mayo, both of Northwestern University, write in a memorial in Endocrine News. Among numerous leadership roles throughout her career, Schwartz founded the American Women in Science (AWIS) in 1971 and was a president of the Endocrine Society in the early 1980s. Schwartz was born in Baltimore, earned her undergraduate degree from Goucher College, and received her doctorate from Northwestern University in 1953. After a faculty position at the University of Illinois College of Medicine, she joined Northwestern in 1973 and remained as a professor there until her retirement in 1999. Her early work focused on rats’ hormonal cycles, and the insight she derived from her studies contributed to a basic understanding of the so-called HPG axis, the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal crosstalk of hormones that controls reproduction. Schwartz later discovered a peptide-based feedback system controlling hormone levels in the ovaries, and described the hormone inhibin, which blocks follicle stimulating hormone (FSH). The presence of inhibin had been proposed decades earlier, but nobody had searched for it in the follicle fluid of ovaries—until Schwartz and her colleague at the University of Maryland, Cornelia Channing took up the cause. Channing had sent Schwartz the fluid, and Schwartz found that it made FSH levels drop. © 1986-2018 The Scientist

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 5: Hormones and the Brain
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 24925 - Posted: 05.01.2018

By RANDI HUTTER EPSTEIN Getting a high testosterone reading offers bragging rights for some men of a certain age — and may explain in part the lure of testosterone supplements. But once you are within a normal range, does your level of testosterone, the male hormone touted to build energy, libido and confidence, really tell you that much? Probably not, experts say. Normal testosterone levels in men range from about 300 to 1,000 nanograms per deciliter of blood. Going from one number within the normal zone to another one may not pack much of a punch. “You don’t see the big improvement once men are within the normal range,” said Dr. Shalender Bhasin, an endocrinologist and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. The largest differences in terms of energy and sex drive are when men go from below-normal to normal levels. A 2015 study in JAMA found that sex drive improved among men who went from about 230, considered low, to 500, around the middle of what’s considered normal. There was no difference among men who moved within the normal range from 300 to 500. Testosterone does influence muscle size. The more testosterone a man takes, the larger the muscle — regardless of starting level, one reason the hormone is popular with young bodybuilders. But testosterone supplements do not seem to help frail older men walk farther or get out of chairs more easily, goals that doctors typically look for in aiding older patients. Beginning at age 30, testosterone levels drop, on average, about 1 percent a year. About 5 percent of men between the ages of 50 and 59 have low levels of testosterone along with symptoms like loss of libido and sluggishness, according to a few small studies. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases; Chapter 5: Hormones and the Brain
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex; Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 24792 - Posted: 03.28.2018

By Nicola Davis Your book is all about reproductive hormones, and their impact on our behaviour. It only focuses on female hormones. Why not look at men’s too? Two reasons. One is that the focus of research in my lab is to look at women’s hormones. The other is that I think there are problems with how people have viewed hormones and women, and I really want to debunk those myths, then pursue some of the implications for further exploring links between women’s hormones and their behaviour. I think they are really important for women’s wellbeing. You say that some people, including women, have pushed back against discussing the influence of hormones. Why is that? I get a strong sense that if you ascribe a woman’s behaviour to biology, people will automatically think that women are automatons, driven by their hormones and unable to regulate their own behaviour. That is false. There is a female stereotype, whereby any time a woman does something a little bit difficult to understand, then it is hormones that make women “irrational”. But nobody says that about men. For that reason, those who are concerned about women achieving equality with men worry that if we talk about women and hormones, then people will say such things as women shouldn’t hold higher office and so on. That’s silly, because men have hormones, too. Are you surprised by how recently we have begun investigating the impact of hormones on women? One reason is that scientists were content for many decades with studying the male as the default sex, and that was in part because women had cycles that made them messy. If you are doing a scientific experiment, you don’t want noise, you don’t want variation, you want everything to be strictly controlled. © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 5: Hormones and the Brain; Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex; Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 24746 - Posted: 03.13.2018

Aimee Cunningham Internist Gail Povar has many female patients making their way through menopause, some having a tougher time than others. Several women with similar stories stand out in her mind. Each came to Povar’s Silver Spring, Md., office within a year or two of stopping her period, complaining of frequent hot flashes and poor sleep at night. “They just felt exhausted all the time,” Povar says. “The joy had kind of gone out.” And all of them “were just absolutely certain that they were not going to take hormone replacement,” she says. But the women had no risk factors that would rule out treating their symptoms with hormones. So Povar suggested the women try hormone therapy for a few months. “If you feel really better and it makes a big difference in your life, then you and I can decide how long we continue it,” Povar told them. “And if it doesn’t make any difference to you, stop it.” At the follow-up appointments, all of these women reacted the same way, Povar recalls. “They walked in beaming, absolutely beaming, saying, ‘I can’t believe I didn’t do this a year ago. My life! I’ve got my life back.’ ” That doesn’t mean, Povar says, that she’s pushing hormone replacement on patients. “But it should be on the table,” she says. “It should be part of the discussion.” Hormone replacement therapy toppled off the table for many menopausal women and their doctors in 2002. That’s when a women’s health study, stopped early after a data review, published results linking a common hormone therapy to an increased risk of breast cancer, heart disease, stroke and blood clots. The trial, part of a multifaceted project called the Women’s Health Initiative, or WHI, was meant to examine hormone therapy’s effectiveness in lowering the risk of heart disease and other conditions in women ages 50 to 79. It wasn’t a study of hormone therapy for treating menopausal symptoms. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 5: Hormones and the Brain; Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex; Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 24512 - Posted: 01.10.2018

/ By Deborah Blum I’m hesitating over this one question I want to ask the scientist on the phone, a federal researcher studying the health effects of soy formula on infants. I worry that it’s going to sound slightly Dr. Frankenstein-esque. Finally, I spill it out anyway: “Are we talking about a kind of accidental experiment in altering child development?” The line goes briefly silent. “I’m a little worried about the word ‘experiment,’” replies Jack Taylor, a senior investigator at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, a division of the National Institutes of Health. Taylor and his colleagues in North Carolina have been comparing developmental changes in babies fed soy formula, cow-milk formula, and breastmilk. His group’s most recent paper, “Soy Formula and Epigenetic Modifications,” reported that soy-fed infant girls show some distinct genetic changes in vaginal cells, possibly “associated with decreased expression of an estrogen-responsive gene.” But his first reaction is that my phrasing would, incorrectly, “make it sound like we were giving children a bad drug on purpose.” The research group, he emphasizes, is merely comparing the health of infants after their parents independently choose a preferred feeding method. No one is forcing soy formula on innocent infants. “No, no, that’s not what I meant,” I explain with some hurry. “I wasn’t suggesting that you were experimenting on children.” Rather, I was wondering whether we as a culture, with our fondness for all things soy, have created a kind of inadvertent national study. Soy accounts for about 12 percent of the U.S. formula market and I’ve become increasingly curious about what this means. Because the science does seem to suggest that we are rather casually testing the effect of plant hormones on human development, most effectively by feeding infants a constant diet of a food rich in such compounds. Copyright 2017 Undark

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 5: Hormones and the Brain; Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex; Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 23912 - Posted: 08.03.2017

By JANE E. BRODY Problems with estrogen and testosterone, the body’s main sex hormones, tend to attract widespread public interest. But we might all be better off paying more attention to a far more common endocrine disorder: abnormal levels of thyroid hormone. Thyroid disorders can affect a wide range of bodily functions and cause an array of confusing and often misdiagnosed symptoms. Because the thyroid, a small gland in the neck behind the larynx, regulates energy production and metabolism throughout the body, including the heart, brain, skin, bowels and body temperature, too much or too little of its hormones can have a major impact on health and well-being. Yet in a significant number of people with thyroid deficiencies, routine blood tests fail to detect insufficient thyroid hormone, leaving patients without an accurate explanation for their symptoms. These can include excessive fatigue, depression, hair loss, unexplained weight gain, constipation, sleep problems, mental fogginess and anxiety. Women of childbearing age may have difficulty getting pregnant or staying pregnant. Although thyroid disorders are more common in adults, children, whose cognitive and physical development depend on normal thyroid function, are not necessarily spared. In a review article published last year in JAMA Pediatrics, doctors from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia pressed primary care doctors to recognize childhood thyroid disease and begin treatment as early as the second week of life to ensure normal development. Hypothyroidism — low hormone levels — in particular is often misdiagnosed, its symptoms resembling those of other diseases or mistaken for “normal” effects of aging. Indeed, the risk of hypothyroidism rises with age. Twenty percent of people over 75, most of them women, lack sufficient levels of thyroid hormone that, among other problems, can cause symptoms of confusion commonly mistaken for dementia. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 5: Hormones and the Brain
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 23866 - Posted: 07.24.2017

By THERESE HUSTON “Does being over 40 make you feel like half the man you used to be?” Ads like that have led to a surge in the number of men seeking to boost their testosterone. The Food and Drug Administration reports that prescriptions for testosterone supplements have risen to 2.3 million from 1.3 million in just four years. There is such a condition as “low-T,” or hypogonadism, which can cause fatigue and diminished sex drive, and it becomes more common as men age. But according to a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine, half of the men taking prescription testosterone don’t have a deficiency. Many are just tired and want a lift. But they may not be doing themselves any favors. It turns out that the supplement isn’t entirely harmless: Neuroscientists are uncovering evidence suggesting that when men take testosterone, they make more impulsive — and often faulty — decisions. Researchers have shown for years that men tend to be more confident about their intelligence and judgments than women, believing that solutions they’ve generated are better than they actually are. This hubris could be tied to testosterone levels, and new research by Gideon Nave, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, along with Amos Nadler at Western University in Ontario, reveals that high testosterone can make it harder to see the flaws in one’s reasoning. How might heightened testosterone lead to overconfidence? One possible explanation lies in the orbitofrontal cortex, a region just behind the eyes that’s essential for self-evaluation, decision making and impulse control. The neuroscientists Pranjal Mehta at the University of Oregon and Jennifer Beer at the University of Texas, Austin, have found that people with higher levels of testosterone have less activity in their orbitofrontal cortex. Studies show that when that part of the brain is less active, people tend to be overconfident in their reasoning abilities. It’s as though the orbitofrontal cortex is your internal editor, speaking up when there’s a potential problem with your work. Boost your testosterone and your editor goes reassuringly (but misleadingly) silent. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases; Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex; Chapter 14: Attention and Higher Cognition
Link ID: 23776 - Posted: 06.26.2017

Cassie Martin Long typecast as the strong silent type, bones are speaking up. In addition to providing structural support, the skeleton is a versatile conversationalist. Bones make hormones that chat with other organs and tissues, including the brain, kidneys and pancreas, experiments in mice have shown. “The bone, which was considered a dead organ, has really become a gland almost,” says Beate Lanske, a bone and mineral researcher at Harvard School of Dental Medicine. “There’s so much going on between bone and brain and all the other organs, it has become one of the most prominent tissues being studied at the moment.” At least four bone hormones moonlight as couriers, recent studies show, and there could be more. Scientists have only just begun to decipher what this messaging means for health. But cataloging and investigating the hormones should offer a more nuanced understanding of how the body regulates sugar, energy and fat, among other things. Of the hormones on the list of bones’ messengers — osteocalcin, sclerostin, fibroblast growth factor 23 and lipocalin 2 — the last is the latest to attract attention. Lipocalin 2, which bones unleash to stem bacterial infections, also works in the brain to control appetite, physiologist Stavroula Kousteni of Columbia University Medical Center and colleagues reported in the March 16 Nature. After mice eat, their bone-forming cells absorb nutrients and release a hormone called lipocalin 2 (LCN2) into the blood. LCN2 travels to the brain, where it gloms on to appetite-regulating nerve cells, which tell the brain to stop eating, a recent study suggests. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2017.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 5: Hormones and the Brain; Chapter 13: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex; Chapter 9: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Link ID: 23762 - Posted: 06.22.2017

Paula Span “During the past four weeks, have you been tired? Been exhausted? Had difficulty getting motivated to do anything at all?” These questions — which a substantial chunk of the population probably could answer in the affirmative — appeared on a questionnaire used in a major European study published recently in The New England Journal of Medicine. The authors were researching the effectiveness of a drug that is widely, if controversially, used to treat older adults with subclinical hypothyroidism, better known as a slightly underactive thyroid. So many Americans take that medication — levothyroxine (brand name Synthroid) — that it topped the list of prescription drugs dispensed in the United States in 2015, according to the research firm QuintilesIMS Institute. With 121 million prescriptions annually, levothyroxine outpaced statins, blood pressure meds — and everything else. A Johns Hopkins survey published last year found that more than 15 percent of older Americans were taking it. So you’d think these study results would come as shocking news: The European team reported that in older people with mild hypothyroidism, the drug had no significant effect on symptoms. At all. Instead, the results bolstered what a number of geriatricians and endocrinologists have suspected for years. “It’s a strong signal that this is an overused medication,” said Dr. Juan Brito, an endocrinologist at the Mayo Clinic. “Some people really need this medicine, but not the vast majority of people who are taking it.” © 2017 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 5: Hormones and the Brain
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 23522 - Posted: 04.22.2017

By RONI CARYN RABIN Television ads for “low T” have sparked a rise in the use of testosterone gels, patches and injections by older men in recent years, according to a new report. But anyone hoping that a dose of testosterone will provide an easy antidote for sagging muscles, flagging energy and a retiring sex drive may find the results of recent government studies of the sex hormone sobering. The latest clinical trials, published over the past year, are the first rigorous ones to assess the potential beneficial effects of testosterone treatment for older men with abnormally low levels of the hormone. Scientists followed 790 men age 65 and older who had blood testosterone levels below 275 nanograms per deciliter of blood, well below the average for healthy young men and lower than would be expected with normal aging. The men also had symptoms reflecting their low hormone levels, like loss of sex drive. Half the participants were treated with testosterone gel, and half were given a placebo gel. The studies reported mixed results, finding that over the yearlong study period, testosterone therapy corrected anemia, or low levels of red blood cells, which can cause fatigue, and increased bone density. But a study to see if testosterone improved memory or cognitive function found no effects. Meanwhile, a red flag warning of possible risks to the heart emerged from the studies: Imaging tests found a greater buildup of noncalcified plaque in the coronary arteries of men treated with testosterone for a year, an indicator of cardiac risk, compared with those who were given a placebo gel. The findings of plaque were not a complete surprise; many reports have tied testosterone use to an increase in heart attacks, and the Food and Drug Administration already requires testosterone products to carry warnings of an increased risk of heart attacks and stroke (men at high risk of cardiovascular disease were not allowed to participate in the latest trials). But observational studies, which are weaker, have yielded mixed results over all, with one study published last month finding that men taking testosterone actually had fewer heart problems. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases; Chapter 5: Hormones and the Brain
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex; Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 23413 - Posted: 03.28.2017

Patricia Neighmond Many men over 65 with low testosterone levels say their sense of well-being, not to mention sexual function, isn't what it used to be. That's why some doctors prescribe testosterone replacement. But the effectiveness of testosterone has been controversial. Studies of the risks and benefits have been mixed, and the Food and Drug Administration beefed up its warnings about cardiac side effects of testosterone supplementation in 2015. And the findings of five studies released Tuesday aren't likely to clear up the confusion. They appear in JAMA, the journal of the American Medical Association and JAMA Internal Medicine. The studies are collectively called the Testosterone Trials (TTrials) and they compared a testosterone gel, AndroGel, against a placebo. The results are based on 788 men with below normal levels of testosterone studied at 12 sites across the country over a year. Overall, researchers saw improvements in bone density and bone strength in men who used a testosterone gel, which raised their testosterone to levels seen in younger men. In men with unexplained anemia, testosterone also improved iron levels in the blood. (A reviewer of the study raised questions about whether it was done ethically.) But in men using testosterone who had been reporting memory problems at the start of the study, there were no improvements in memory or cognition. And there were worrisome signs of an increase in the risk of cardiovascular problems. © 2017 npr

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases; Chapter 5: Hormones and the Brain
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex; Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 23267 - Posted: 02.22.2017

By LISA SANDERS, M.D. “You don’t look well,” the man at the gas station told the older woman in the car. He’d known her for years, always thinking of her as a lively, robust woman. But that day she looked pale and tired. Her sharp blue eyes seemed dim. She gave a feeble smile. “I don’t feel well at all,” she told him. There’s an urgent-care clinic just up the street, he said. Could she make it there? She was nearly 45 minutes away from her home in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Stopping just up the street seemed a much better option. At the clinic, the doctor took one look at her, put a blood pressure cuff around her arm and told her assistant to call an ambulance. The rest of the day was a blur. The woman remembers being bundled onto a stretcher and one of the E.M.T.s saying her blood pressure was very low. It was an odd thing to hear, because her blood pressure was usually high enough to require three medications. She was taken to the emergency room at the Queen Elizabeth II Health Sciences Center in Halifax. She remembers being fussed over — having blood drawn, receiving intravenous fluids, feeling sticky snaps being placed on her chest that connected her to a continuous heart monitor. She had been a nurse for many years when she was younger, yet seeing herself at the center of these familiar activities was strange. A blood test indicated that there may have been damage to her heart. The doctor told her she was having a heart attack, she recalls. You’ve got the wrong patient, she thought to herself. Sure, she had a little high blood pressure, a little asthma, a little back pain. But problems with her heart? Never. The patient used a cane, but she had no difficulty getting up on the exam table — an important test of mobility. © 2017 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 5: Hormones and the Brain; Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex; Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 23101 - Posted: 01.14.2017

By Virginia Morell Only three known species go through menopause: killer whales, short-finned pilot whales, and humans. Two years ago, scientists suggested whales do this to focus their attention on the survival of their families rather than on birthing more offspring. But now this same team reports there’s another—and darker—reason: Older females enter menopause because their eldest daughters begin having calves, leading to fights over resources. The findings might also apply to humans, the scientists say. “What an interesting paper,” says Phyllis Lee, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Stirling in the United Kingdom, who was not involved in the study. “It brings two perspectives on menopause neatly together, and provides an elegant model for its rarity.” The new work came about when Darren Croft, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, and his colleagues looked back on their 2015 killer whale menopause study. “That showed how they helped and why they lived so long after menopause, but it didn’t explain why they stop reproducing,” he says, noting that in other species, such as elephants, older females also share wisdom and knowledge with their daughters, but continue to have calves. © 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 23096 - Posted: 01.13.2017

National Institutes of Health (NIH) researchers have discovered molecular mechanisms that may underlie a woman’s susceptibility to disabling irritability, sadness, and anxiety in the days leading up to her menstrual period. Such premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) affects 2 to 5 percent of women of reproductive age, whereas less severe premenstrual syndrome (PMS) is much more common. “We found dysregulated expression in a suspect gene complex which adds to evidence that PMDD is a disorder of cellular response to estrogen and progesterone,” explained Peter Schmidt, M.D. of the NIH’s National Institute of Mental Health, Behavioral Endocrinology Branch. “Learning more about the role of this gene complex holds hope for improved treatment of such prevalent reproductive endocrine-related mood disorders.” Schmidt, David Goldman, M.D., of the NIH’s National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, and colleagues, report on their findings January 3, 2017 in the journal Molecular Psychiatry. “This is a big moment for women’s health, because it establishes that women with PMDD have an intrinsic difference in their molecular apparatus for response to sex hormones – not just emotional behaviors they should be able to voluntarily control,” said Goldman. By the late 1990s, the NIMH team had demonstrated (link is external) that women who regularly experience mood disorder symptoms just prior to their periods were abnormally sensitive to normal changes in sex hormones — even though their hormone levels were normal. But the cause remained a mystery.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 5: Hormones and the Brain; Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex; Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 23052 - Posted: 01.04.2017

By LISA SANDERS, M.D. On Thursday, we challenged Well readers to take on the complicated case of a 50-year-old woman who felt feverish and couldn’t stop vomiting and who ended up losing a lot of weight. Like the doctors who saw her as she searched for a diagnosis, many of you focused on her recent journey to Kenya as the source of her symptoms. It was a completely reasonable approach, and one that was extensively explored by the doctors who cared for her. But ultimately it was incorrect. This was a really tough case. Indeed, only three of you got it right. The correct diagnosis was: Hyperthyroidism Thyroid hormone controls metabolism. The more of this hormone flowing in the body, the harder the body works. Because this hormone plays such an important role in how we function, the body tightly regulates how much of it is released and when. But just like every other system in the body, that regulatory mechanism can mess up, releasing either too little hormone (hypothyroidism) or, as in this case, too much. The usual symptoms of hyperthyroidism are pretty apparent: The heart races; patients are sweaty, shaky, itchy and sometimes feverish. The appetite increases, but because the entire body is revved up, there is often weight loss. Bowel movements become more frequent and sleep harder to come by. Frequent and uncontrolled vomiting is less common but has been reported. This patient had all of these symptoms. The most common cause of hyperthyroidism is an autoimmune disorder known as Graves’ disease, named after Dr. Robert Graves, a 19th-century Irish physician who wrote about the phenomenon of rapid and violent palpitations associated with an enlarged thyroid gland. In the 20th century it was discovered that the symptoms result when antibodies, the foot soldiers of the immune system, cause excess stimulation of the thyroid gland, resulting in the uncontrolled production and release of thyroid hormone. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 5: Hormones and the Brain
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 22624 - Posted: 09.03.2016

By Knvul Sheikh Although millions of women use hormone therapy, those who try it in hopes of maintaining sharp memory and preventing the fuzzy thinking sometimes associated with menopause may be disappointed. A new study indicates that taking estrogen does not significantly affect verbal memory and other mental skills. “There is no change in cognitive abilities associated with estrogen therapy for postmenopausal women, regardless of their age,” says Victor Henderson, a neurologist at Stanford University and the study’s lead author. Evidence of positive and negative effects of such hormone therapy has ping-ponged over the years, with some observational studies in postmenopausal women and research in animal models, suggesting it improves cognitive function and memory. But other previous research, including a long-term National Institutes of Health Women’s Health Initiative memory study published in 2004, has suggested that taking estrogen increases the risk of cognitive impairment and dementia in women over 65 years old. Henderson says one explanation for these contradictory findings may be that after menopause begins there is a “critical period” in which hormone therapy could still benefit relatively young women—if they start early enough. So in their study, which appears in the July 20 online Neurology, Henderson and his team recruited 567 healthy women, between ages 41 and 84, to examine how estrogen affected one group whose members were within six years of their last menstrual period and another whose members had started menopause at least 10 years earlier. © 2016 Scientific American

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases; Chapter 5: Hormones and the Brain
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex; Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 22470 - Posted: 07.23.2016

By Jessica Hamzelou TEENAGE pregnancies have hit record lows in the Western world, largely thanks to increased use of contraceptives of all kinds. But strangely, we don’t really know what hormonal contraceptives – pills, patches and injections that contain synthetic sex hormones – are doing to the developing bodies and brains of teenage girls. You’d be forgiven for assuming that we do. After all, the pill has been around for more than 50 years. It has been through many large trials assessing its effectiveness and safety, as have the more recent patches and rings, and the longer-lasting implants and injections. But those studies were done in adult women – very few have been in teenage girls. And biologically, there is a big difference. At puberty, our bodies undergo an upheaval as our hormones go haywire. It isn’t until our 20s that things settle down and our brains and bones reach maturity. “If a drug is going to be given to 11 and 12-year-olds, it needs to be tested in 11 and 12-year-olds,” says Joe Brierley of the clinical ethics committee at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London. Legislation introduced in the US in 2003 and in Europe in 2007 was intended to make this happen but a New Scientist investigation can reveal that there is still scant data on what contraceptives actually do to developing girls. The few studies that have been done suggest that tipping the balance of oestrogen and progesterone during this time may have far-reaching effects, although there is not yet enough data to say whether we should be alarmed. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases; Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex; Chapter 4: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 22407 - Posted: 07.08.2016