Oestrogen and the Female Brain

Due to having all sorts of interesting problems with various hormones circulating in my system, probably caused by some genetic weirdness, I've been doing a bit of research.

But this one comes from Mags, a good friend of mine over in Adelaide, and it's too good not to blog, being about both Hormones and Brains.

From Science Daily :

University of Minnesota researchers have demonstrated how estrogen affects learning and memory. They found that estrogen can activate particular glutamate receptors within the hippocampus, the brain region responsible for many aspects of learning and memory. Glutamate is the primary excitatory neurotransmitter in the brain, allowing for fast communication between neurons. By examining hippocampal neurons from rats, researchers also observed that estrogen only activated the processes related to learning and memory in the brains of female rats and not males. While it has been well documented that estrogen influences other behaviors beyond reproduction, including learning and memory, the mechanism has remained elusive. The findings of this research are in this week's Journal of Neuroscience.

"We believe this is an important first step in understanding not just how estrogen affects learning and memory, but also a variety of non-reproductive behaviors," says Paul Mermelstein, Ph.D., assistant professor of neuroscience at the University of Minnesota and lead researcher. "Estrogen activation of glutamate receptors within other brain regions could also potentially account for the well-documented actions of this hormone on female motor control and pain sensation."

Marissa Boulware, a University of Minnesota neuroscience graduate student who performed the studies states, "Every day post-menopausal women face the dilemma of taking estrogens to improve their cognitive abilities, knowing it may pose a potential heath risk. By better understanding how estrogen acts upon our brain, one day we may develop novel therapies using non-steroidal drugs to mimic the specific actions of estrogen on processes related to learning and memory, affording the cognitive benefits of estrogen without any detrimental side effects."

Note that males miss out on the benefits. Perhaps it's just as well, the side-effects of an excess of oestrogen on a male phenotype are better imagined than described.

Of course, there'd be some technogeeks who wouldn't mind being more well-endowed than their girlfriends if it meant they'd gain in learning and memory.

Perhaps this explains why Kleinfelter males, those with 47,xxy chromosomes rather than the usual 46,xy, (between 1 in 500 and 1 in 1000 of the general population) are over-represented in the IT industry. A fruitful topic for research, anyway.

And no, it's unlikely that I'm a Kleinfelter male, even though I'm taller than my male relatives, have weird thin-walled back teeth, am relatively infertile, have large hips, had dyslexia when young, am in IT, have a rounded face, most but not all of the classic signs in fact.... or if I am Kleinfelter, that's not the only weirdness. Mere 47,xxy wouldn't explain the stuff going on in my endochrine system, especially with the bizarre Cholesterol levels. But I'll find out as soon as the Chromome Analysis results come in.