ESTROGEN MAY AMPLIFY STRESS

BY WILLIAM HATHAWAY THE HARTFORD COURANT

The combination of estrogen and stress may make women more susceptible to anxiety and depression than men, a study by researchers at the Yale University School of Medicine suggests.

The study was one of the first attempting to find a molecular reason why women are about twice as likely to experience major depression and anxiety disorders as men, said Rebecca Shansky, a graduate student in Yale’s neurobiology department and lead author of the study, published in the March issue of the journal Molecular Psychiatry.

“People really haven’t studied this in a gender-specific way,” Shansky said. Stress has been implicated in the development of major depression, a condition marked by disruption in the prefrontal cortex.

This area of the brain regulates behavior, thought and working memory — the ability to plan and organize behavior.

Shansky and other Yale neuro-biologists decided to place rats under stress to gauge the influence estrogen levels have on the rats’ ability to complete simple memory tasks.

Without any stress, male and female rats performed memory tasks equally well.

With high levels of stress, male and female rats both made a lot of errors. However, male rats performed significantly better at memory tasks than females when placed under moderate stress.

On closer study, researchers discovered that female rats performed poorly on the tests only during proesterus, when they produced high levels of estrogen.

During estrus, or with low estrogen levels, there was no impairment.

The scientists then removed the ovaries of female rats and repeated the experiment, giving some rats estrogen replacement and other placebos.

Again, they found that female rats with high levels of estrogen performed worse on memory tasks than those without.

The results suggest that estrogen may amplify the negative effect of stress on the brain’s ability to complete certain tasks, Shansky said.

It could be that estrogen also increases susceptibility to stress-related disorders, such as depression and anxiety, which would help explain why the increased risk ends at menopause, she said.

However, Shansky said estrogen may have beneficial effects on other areas of the brain and on other functions — such as long-term memory formation.

“It is important that this study isn’t presented as saying estrogen is bad for women,” Shansky said.

Dr. Nick Martinis, assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Connecticut Health Center, said estrogen can have some beneficial effects on the serotonin system, which often malfunctions in depressed patients.
DeMartinis speculated that in some women the combination of high levels of stress and estrogen interferes with serotonin regulation and triggers depression.

Teasing out female-specific contributing factors may have great value in developing new treatments for anxiety and depression, DeMartinis said.

“There may be ways to treat depression that are more helpful to women than men, but we haven’t found them yet,” he said. “When we figure that out, we may be able to customize those treatments.”

A PRODUCT ALL WOMEN SHOULD BE ON.