Hormones not really affect the mood of women?

In the last fifteen years the field of endocrinology has produced a wealth of evidence that estrogen loss that normally occurs during the menstrual cycle changes puts women at greater risk for mood, anxiety and anxiety disorders. given the prevalence of these diseases among women, we are fortunate to be gaining a better understanding of them.

Women are twice as likely to become depressed. Research shows that they are also more likely to suffer from anxiety. more develop phobias. Is the same ratio for agoraphobia: nearly 8% of women become agoraphobic, compared with only 3% of men. more succumb to post traumatic stress syndrome. Seventy percent of people with social phobia are women. What could be happening here?

The cyclical nature of estrogen secretion may account for the special women’s vulnerability to mood disorders and anxiety, Dr. Mary Seeman reported in the Journal of the American Psychiatric Association, in an analysis of dozens of studies of how female hormones affect psychopathology in both men and women.

The theory of “recurrent estrogen withdrawal” proposed a low estrogen state units of the onset or worsening of mood symptoms in women who are predisposed – by virtue of the already low levels of serotonin – a disorder mood and anxiety. In 1996, researchers at the University of Edinburgh published a report discussing the molecular level to which these changes occur. Beaten by “profound effects on mood, mental state and memory” of the estrogen hormone described “psychoprotectant nature.” sufficient levels of estrogen must be present in the brain, ie, if the mental stability to be maintained. importance of estrogen for cognitive processing and memory is not a minor matter. it has been discovered that actually buffers brain neurons against degeneration.

In the late nineties mounting evidence had begun to show a unique hormonal and persistent connection to almost all mental disorders in women. For example, binge eating and purging in bulimia worsened during the premenstruum, when estrogen levels decrease. So did the panic attacks in women with panic disorder. impulse disorders, too, seemed to get worse during that week or ten days before your period starts – more adventures in kleptomania was stealing, trichotillomaniacs pull more hair cutters, skin broken skin more .. All these diseases are related to serotonin dysfunction, and as we have seen, serotonin and estrogen are inextricably linked.

In the nineties, a Canadian psychologist, Barbara Sherwin, was carrying out very interesting studies on how the loss of estrogen affects cognition and memory. I went to Toronto to spend a day with Dr. Sherwin in his office at McGill University. I needed a mini-course of estrogen and was willing to give me.

Early fetal life, hormone receptors are present in the hypothalamus of the brain. this is where begin the organization of brain circuitry, setting the stage for puberty, regulating subsequent adult sexual behavior, and control the frequency and intensity of emotional disorders. Research in neuroendocrinology has much to say about the discomfort before menopause than was previously thought that the result of women’s sadness at the loss of reproductive function. now we know that the mood and cognitive changes experienced are physical in origin.

estrogen affects mood low. I did not know until talking to Dr. Sherwin, is that to produce serotonin in the brain needs estrogen. I do not even know existed estrogen in the brain. “There are estrogen receptors in various organs throughout the body, brain included,” he said. “That’s why the loss of estrogen causes the body so many different symptoms – loss of skin elasticity, bone shrinkage, mood and cognitive impairment.”

When estrogen levels increase, on the other hand, as they do in the first week of menstruation, their overall effect is to increase the amount of serotonin available in the spaces between nerve cells in the brain. Which improves mood. within the brain, estrogen may actually act as a natural antidepressant and mood stabilizer.

Dr. Sherwin introduced me to the work of researchers who were doing important basic science, and Bruce McEwen at Rockefeller Institute in new York, and Joseph LeDoux, new York University, who were discovering the molecular changes that support the idea that estrogen had profound effects on the mind and its capabilities.

It was not long after my visit with Dr. Sherwin I learned from a major revision of a sentence of ten years of law studies, estrogen, serotonin, and disorders: Where is the therapeutic bridge? Two researchers from the Perinatal and Reproductive Psychiatry Program at Harvard Medical School has been essentially motivated by the same question I had: What is the connection of the hormone to women’s mental health? Joffe and Cohen looked at a hundred twenty-five studies on the relationship between hormonal changes in women’s reproductive cycle and mental state. In study after study found that women with a history of depression are apparently more vulnerable to recurrent episodes during periods of “significant change reproductive endocrine.”

The correlation does not prove causality. the fact that someone becomes morbid depression starts exactly on the day of ovulation and remains so to this day that bleeding starts is not proof that the drops in premenstrual mood changes of estrogen causes, but very well that aroused suspicion. once the information of new brain imaging techniques has been added to the mix, in the case of a hormonal connection for mental vulnerabilities of women became the closest thing to an open and shut case as is likely to get. Neuro-imaging has greatly improved our understanding, indicating lightening flashes of activity in different parts of the brain during what used to be called just, “that time of month.”

It is the dance between two types of hormones, ovarian hormones and brain hormones, which ultimately determines how any woman should be become symptomatic during their menstrual cycle, and other points of reproductive risk as well. if, for example, a woman is genetically encoded to have low or borderline levels of serotonin in the brain, the drop in estrogen that occurs before menstruation may be all you need to send their serotonin spiral below the optimal level of functioning, putting her in a mental state that, for all its distressing symptoms, mysteriously disappears as soon as you start your period and your estrogen levels rise again.

Why is this happening? because serotonin needs estrogen to its metabolism in the brain. the two hormones are a dynamic duo, the operation of the arm. As estrogen levels drop, so does serotonin. When estrogen increases (as does, for example, once menstruation begins) the levels of serotonin come back with her, and calm is restored. the ebb and flow of women “menstrual mood is orchestrated not by the moon, but by secretions of the brain and ovaries. What we now know is that sometimes negative results of these changes in the discharge is not inevitable . Just as science has learned to modify the changes of insulin and thyroid, can now modify the changes of the ovary. if you do not want to blame your mood on the ovaries, blame the brain. the fault is of everything you want, just not to accept the idea that women are born to suffer.

For me it’s fascinating that the individual pieces of the puzzle were important not available to us twenty years ago. And the effect of dynamite to put the pieces together has produced only in the last decade. Based on prior knowledge and photo mounting step by step, endocrinologists in places like California, Neuropsychiatric Institute and the Program Mood Disorders Reproductive Medical Center University of Texas have come to understand that women not only vulnerable during premenstruum, which are vulnerable to all points of reproductive risk. moreover, a woman with one of these points is risk to become vulnerable in other symptoms. if she has genetically low serotonin in the brain, estrogen drops will affect it, as simple as that.

Things have taken a turn more enlightened since then, thank God, but only now are beginning to understand what really happens to women’s mental well-being in times of stress hormones. women scientists, in particular, as psychiatrists and reproductive endocrinologists and Barbara Sherwin, are making a unique and important contribution to the massive increase in research that is shaping a new paradigm for understanding the role of changing all female hormone created in the welfare and mental state.