Carina Heller. Even if it is an unknown person For everyone, his name has gone down in history after being the most scanned woman in neuroscience -every morning, for 75 days, over the course of a year-. And not for pleasure, but rather for the opposite: explore how your brain varies throughout your menstrual cycle.
Yes, both in its natural state as low the effects of real contraceptives. And he has reached a very revealing conclusion in his study published in the journal ‘Nature‘ and presented at the annual conference of the American Society for Neuroscience: Hormonal contraceptives not only affect reproductive healthbut also brain structure and function in women.
Investigation
The analysis, which included numerous brain scans over 365 days, has shown important changes in areas related to memory, emotions and stress responsereflecting the need for greater understanding of these affects.
With a self-experimentation approach, Heller has divided his analysis into three phases:
1. 25 brain scans have been carried out during your natural menstrual cycle, capturing snapshots at various stages.
2. The neuroscientist then took oral contraceptives for three months and repeated the same number of scans.
3. Finally, she stopped taking oral contraceptives to take 25 additional scans three months later.
Discoveries
This methodology has allowed him to observe, among other things, The short- and long-term effects of contraceptive use on brain connectivity and structure. With this, he has discovered that the use of hormonal contraceptives has increased the volume of gray matter in areas such as the hippocampus and basal gangliaboth linked to memory and the control of emotions.
And not only that: it has detected a decrease in connectivity between the amygdala and the cerebral cortex, which could interfere with emotion regulation and stress responses. As if that were not enough, it has also exhibited a significant impact on cognitive abilities.
Future
“We want to offer women tools that allow them to understand better how their bodies and brains react to contraceptives,” said Hellera researcher at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities in Minneapolis.
In the short term, the expert plans to compare her data with that of a woman with endometriosisa painful disease that affects a large percentage of women of reproductive age. Thus, you will be able to know Whether hormonal fluctuations in the brain could be driving the disease.
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