Chronic stress during pregnancy prevents brain benefits of motherhood

A new study in animals shows that chronic stress during pregnancy prevents brain benefits of motherhood, a finding that researchers suggest could increase understanding of postpartum depression.

Rat mothers showed an increase in brain cell connections in regions associated with learning, memory and mood.

In contrast, the brains of mother rats that were stressed twice a day throughout pregnancy did not show this increase.

The researchers were specifically interested in dendritic spines – hair-like growths on brain cells that are used to exchange information with other neurons.

Previous animal studies conducted by lead author Benedetta Leuner of Ohio State University showed that an increase of dendritic spines in new mothers’ brains was associated with improved cognitive function on a task that requires behavioral flexibility – in essence, enabling more effective multitasking.

The dendritic spines increased by about 20 percent in these brain regions in new mothers, according to her findings.

The stress in this new study negated those brain benefits of motherhood, causing the stressed rats’ brains to match brain characteristics of animals that had no reproductive or maternal experience.

The stressed rats also had less physical interaction with their babies than did unstressed rats, a behaviour observed in human mothers who experience postpartum depression.

“Animal mothers in our research that are unstressed show an increase in the number of connections between neurons. Stressed mothers don’t,” said Leuner, assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Ohio State.

“We think that makes the stressed mothers more vulnerable. They don’t have the capacity for brain plasticity that the unstressed mothers do, and somehow that’s contributing to their susceptibility to depression.”


Previous research has suggested that there are a number of risk factors for postpartum depression, including hormone fluctuations, prior history of mental illness and environmental factors such as smoking or low socioeconomic status.

One of the strongest predictors, however, is chronic stress during pregnancy, so Leuner sought to create an animal model that could help explain brain changes linked to postpartum depression.

“It’s devastating not only for the mother, because it affects her well-being, but previous research also has shown that children of depressed mothers have impaired cognitive and social development, may have impaired physical development, and are more likely as adults to have depression or anxiety,” she said.

“A better understanding of postpartum depression is important to help the mother but also to prevent some of the damaging effects that this disorder can have on the child.”

The researchers exposed pregnant rats to stress twice a day by limiting their mobility on some days and on other days placing them in water. For three weeks after the rats gave birth, Leuner and colleagues monitored the rats.

The animals showed classic signs of the effects of stress, including lower than normal weight gain and enlarged adrenal glands, a sign of high stress-hormone production. The mothers stressed during pregnancy also gave birth to smaller pups.

“And they were not very good mothers,” Leuner said. After separation from pups for 30 minutes, unstressed mothers would gather up their babies, put them in the nest and nurse them. Stressed mother rats left the pups scattered around, wandered around the cage and fed the babies less frequently.

The stressed mother rats also exhibited more floating than unstressed rats in a water test; animals that float rather than swim are showing depressive-like symptoms.

“These findings in rats mimic some of the symptoms that are seen in women with postpartum depression,” Leuner said.

An examination of the animals’ brains showed that the rats exposed to chronic stress did not grow the additional dendritic spines in the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex that the unstressed mother rats did.

The stressed rats’ brains more closely resembled the brains of control rats that had never been mothers.

“We don’t yet know what the exact trigger is for the increase in spines in motherhood, but we know that the increase goes away with stress,” Leuner said.

She is continuing the work by investigating whether the beneficial effects of motherhood on cognitive functions are also blocked in mothers who are exposed to pregnancy stress as well as whether hormonal factors play a role.

Science: It's a girl thing! - Official teaser - YouTube

Science: it's a girl thing! From cosmetics to chemistry, from fashion to biology, from rhythm to electronics, girls have what it takes to succeed in science. Put your lab glasses on and see science with different eyes!

A slightly controversial video created with good intentions but coming under a trickle of criticism. What do you think? Good, emberassing, effective, or what?

Women, Aerospace and Innovation on This Week @ NASA - YouTube

NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden and Deputy Administrator Lori Garver helped announce a new series of Women@NASA during a Women's History Month event at George Washington University in Washington.

The Women, Aerospace, and Innovation event showcased new videos from the Women@NASA website highlighting the role of women in science, technology, engineering and math at the agency.

Check out the Women@NASA website. Also, NASA successfully conducted another drop test of the Orion crew vehicle's entry, descent and landing parachutes in preparation for its orbital flight test in 2014, engineers at the Stennis Space Center have moved a J-2X engine to the A-2 Test Stand in preparation for another round of testing, SpaceX completes a "Wet Dress Rehearsal" for its upcoming Falcon 9 demonstration flight to the International Space Station, NASA helps release "Angry Birds Space" and more!

Mae Jemison: NASA's First African-American Woman in Space

Mae Carol Jemison was born in Decatur, Alabama, the youngest child of Charlie Jemison and Dorothy Green.

Her father was a maintenance supervisor for a charity organization, and her mother worked most of her career as an elementary school teacher of English and math at the Beethoven School in Chicago.

The family moved to Chicago, Illinois, when Jemison was three years old, to take advantage of better educational opportunities there.

Jemison says that as a young girl growing up in Chicago she always assumed she would get into space. "I thought, by now, we'd be going into space like you were going to work."

She said it was easier to apply to be a shuttle astronaut, "rather than waiting around in a cornfield, waiting for ET to pick me up or something."

As a child growing up, Jemison learned to make connections to science by studying nature. "It sounds a little gross, but I was fascinated with pus," Jemison said.

Once when a splinter infected her thumb as a little girl, Jemison's mother turned it into a learning experience. She ended up doing a whole project about pus.

Jemison wouldn't let anyone dissuade her from pursuing a career in science. "In kindergarten, my teacher asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I told her a scientist," Jemison says.

"She said, 'Don't you mean a nurse?' Now, there's nothing wrong with being a nurse, but that's not what I wanted to be."

Jemison says she was inspired by Martin Luther King Jr. but to her King's dream wasn't an elusive fantasy but a call to action. "Too often people paint him like Santa -- smiley and inoffensive," says Jemison. "But when I think of Martin Luther King, I think of attitude, audacity, and bravery."

Jemison thinks the civil rights movement was all about breaking down the barriers to human potential. "The best way to make dreams come true is to wake up," says Jemison.

Read more about Mae Jemison at Wikipedia

Still working hard for young people and encouraging them to take up challenges and follow their aspirations. She is seen here, at JPL, with actors from Hollywood.

Mae Jemison (second from the right) in JPL with producer, actors and crew of the Hollywood film 'Redtails', a film about the advenntures of the first African-American air force squadron in WWII.

Adiponectin: Hormone affects Dementia in Woman

Women with an abnormal number of a certain hormone are more likely to develop dementia, as suggested by latest study conducted in cooperation with the Framingham Heart Study (FHS).

Participants from the Boston University cardiovascular research initiatives provided frozen blood samples that allowed scientists to isolate a hormone known as adiponectin, which the new research findings said appear to be connected with dementia.

According to a report by U.S. network ABC, the study drew its conclusion on the analysis of 840 participants, which were monitored for 13 years, with 159 of them suffering brain degeneration with one common denominator - high presence of adiponectin.

The results, according to Dr Ernst Schaefer of Tufts University, were somewhat perplexing as the pursued links between dementia and diabetes were further complicated by what the researchers have so far appreciated from the decade-old study.

While science generally regards adiponectin as an important agent in preventing the onset of diabetes, its purportedly dementia-inducing function, at least in the context of the FHS experiment, had caught the researchers by surprise.

"Chemo Brain" - Brain Scan Study Finds Evidence

Women who survive breast cancer after undergoing chemotherapy may also have to contend with impairments in attention, memory and planning skills, U.S. researchers said Monday.

They said women who had undergone chemotherapy for breast cancer had significantly less activity in parts of the brain responsible for executive functioning tasks compared with breast cancer patients who were not treated with chemotherapy.

Among those treated with chemotherapy, the study also found a strong correlation between women who complained they were having trouble with memory and thinking skills and actual deficits in these regions of the brain.

The study may help explain why many breast cancer patients complain of "chemo brain" -- a term used to describe foggy thinking and memory lapses following treatment with chemotherapy.

"This is a huge validation for these women who are telling their doctors 'something is wrong with me'," said Shelli Kesler of Stanford University School of Medicine in California, whose study appears in the Archives of Neurology.

Kesler said the conventional thinking is that chemotherapy drugs cannot cross a protective membrane called the blood-brain barrier that protects the brain from toxins.

And doctors have dismissed women's complaints of brain deficits after chemotherapy, chalking them up to exaggeration and stress related to the cancer.

"This shows that when a patient reports she's struggling with these types of problems, there's a good chance there has been a brain change," Kesler said.

Her study involved 25 breast cancer patients who had been treated with chemotherapy, 19 breast cancer patients who had surgery and other treatments, and 18 healthy women.

All were asked to perform a card-sorting task that involves problem-solving skills while their brain activity was monitored through functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI.

The women also completed questionnaires to assess their own cognitive abilities.

As in prior studies of cancer patients, the team saw significant reductions in activity in two parts of the prefrontal cortex, including one used for working memory, cognitive control and monitoring.

But they also found significantly reduced activation of an additional region of the prefrontal cortex linked with executive function -- the area of the brain needed for planning.

Women in the chemotherapy group were also found to make more errors on the card-sorting task and take longer to complete it than healthy women and cancer patients who were not treated with chemotherapy.

While a finding in 25 women seems small, Kesler said it is large for a brain scan study and points to a need to start identifying which women who undergo chemotherapy are most vulnerable to these types of deficits.

She said future studies should be done in which women are tested before they undergo chemotherapy to determine the impact of treatment on brain function.

Women are increasingly surviving their breast cancer, with breast cancer survivors comprising 22 percent of the nearly 12 million cancer survivors in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Paraplegic Woman walks again with aid of Exoskeleton

It’s been almost twenty years since Amanda Boxtel stood on her own two feet due to a freak skiing accident in Colorado, but today she’s up and walking again thanks to an exoskeleton from Ekso Bionics.

As Boxtel notes, this is only the first step in exoskeleton technology and someday, she hopes to dance again, cheek-to-cheek.

Testosterone reduces the empathetic responses in Women

Testosterone - Lauded by some and viewed with suspicion by others, few people have a completely neutral view of the hormone that separates boys from girls.

According to the extreme male brain theory of autism, the organising effects of testosterone on the brain in utero, and its ongoing shaping of social behaviors throughout life, explains why men exhibit more aggressive, risk-taking behaviour than women do.

It may also account for the social intelligence deficits of people with autism and the skewed gender ratio of the disorder.

A new study shows that even a little bit of testosterone administered under the tongue can cause a woman to show less empathy — to behave, in other words, more like a man.

This is especially true, researchers say, when a woman has been exposed to higher-than-average levels of testosterone as a fetus.

The 2D:4D Finger Test
One increasingly accepted marker of fetal androgen exposure is the 2D:4D ratio, comparing the length of the index finger to that of the ring finger on the right hand. In women, the ring finger is typically longer than the index finger, whereas in men, or in individuals with high fetal testosterone exposure, the two fingers are of nearly identical length.

Exposure to lower testosterone levels in utero, as inferred by a higher 2D:4D ratio, may protect men from prostate cancer. Researchers have also reported lower 2D:4D ratios in children with autism and in their parents and siblings.

In the study, researchers administered a single 0.5 mg dose of testosterone to 16 young women between 20 and 25 years of age in one session, and a single dose of placebo in a second session 48 hours later. The women experienced a ten-fold increase in blood testosterone levels 15 minutes after intake, with the levels returning to baseline in about an hour and a half.

During that time, the participants took a test of cognitive empathy called Reading the Mind in the Eyes, which asks them to infer the emotions expressed in a photograph of a pair of eyes. Interestingly, 75 percent of the women in the study achieved lower scores on the test after testosterone than after placebo.

When the researchers compared the women's 2D:4D ratios, as computed from scans of their right hands, they found something even more interesting: the women with the lowest 2D:4D ratios (highest fetal testosterone exposure) showed the most significant decrease in empathy as measured by the test.

This may not be not a slam-dunk for the extreme male brain theory, but the results jibe with other studies that have found a continuum of social cognition abilities.

PTSD: Woman who cannot feel fear

A Red Knee'd Tarantula

A woman who cannot feel afraid because of a missing structure in her brain could help scientists discover treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Research published in Current Biology showed the woman felt no fear in a variety of scary situations.

These included exposure to snakes and spiders, horror films and a "haunted house". The woman feels other emotions but said as an adult, she had never felt afraid. She is the first known case of someone who is unable to process fear.

Researchers at the University of Iowa said her inability to feel frightened was because she is missing a structure in her brain called the amygdala.

The structure has long been associated with emotional learning - experiments in animals have shown that removing it makes them fearless. However, it has never been observed in a human before.

The woman experienced fear as a child and knows that some situations should be frightening. As an adult she has been in various frightening situations, including being threatened with a knife and held at gunpoint.

Researchers at the University of Iowa, in Iowa City, observed and recorded the woman's responses in situations that would make most people feel fear.

She watched a series of horror films, went to a reputedly haunted house and to an exotic pet store - where she handled dangerous snakes and asked to handle a tarantula.

She showed no fear in any of the situations and had to be prevented from touching the tarantula because of the high risk of being bitten.

When asked why she wanted to touch something that she knows is dangerous, she replied that she was overcome with curiosity.

Lead researcher Justin Feinstein said: "Because she is missing her amygdala, she is also missing the ability to detect and avoid danger in the world. "It is quite remarkable that she is still alive."

Sally Ride NASA US Astronaut - Launching Into History

NASA - Launching Into History

On June 18, 1983, a young physicist from California took her seat aboard the space shuttle and launched into history.

On that date, Sally Ride became the first American woman in space as a mission specialist on STS-7. In this image

Ride monitors control panels from the pilot's chair on the Flight Deck.

Unfortunately this was a full 20 years after the USSR cosmonauts, due to rampant masogyny in the US and NASA.

Image Credit: NASA

Men and women respond to stress in different ways

Men and women respond differently to stress ScienceBlog.com

Defensiveness is a trait characterised by avoidance, denial or repression of information perceived as threatening. In women, a strong defensive reaction to judgment from others or a threat to self-esteem will result in high blood pressure and heart rate. Contrarily, older men with low defensive reactions have a higher cardiovascular rates.

A study was conducted on 81 healthy working men and 118 women. According to Dr. Jean-Claude Tardif a Université de Montréal professor and Montreal Heart Institute researcher, the physiological response to stress in women and older men is linked to this desire of maintaining self-esteem and securing social bonds.

"The sense of belonging is a basic human need," says D'Antono. "Our findings suggest that socialising is innate and that belonging to a group contributed to the survival of our ancestors. Today, it is possible that most people view social exclusion as a threat to their existence. A strong defensive reaction is useful to maintain one's self-esteem faced with this potential threat."

As part of the experiment, participants completed four tasks of varying stress levels.

• The first task involved reading a neutral text on Antarctica's geography before a person of the same sex.
• The second and third tasks involved role-playing in which participants followed a script where they were sometimes agreeable and sometimes aggressive.
• The final task involved a non-scripted debate on abortion.

Heart rate and blood pressure were measured during each of these tasks as was the level of cortisol in saliva. Results showed that women and older men had elevated cardiovascular, autonomic and endocrine responses to stress, all potentially damaging to their health.

However. the research team cautions that more studies are needed to evaluate the long-term effects of defensiveness and its association to stress response patterns in disease development.

Scientists Claim Womb Transplants possible within 2 Years

The first successful human womb transplant could take place within two years, British scientists have said. London-based experts say they have worked out how to transplant a womb with a regular blood supply so it will last long enough to carry a pregnancy.

Research involving donor rabbits was presented at a US fertility conference. The charity Uterine Transplant UK is seeking funding of £250,000 after being denied grants by several medical research bodies.

A breakthrough could offer an alternative to surrogacy or adoption for women whose own wombs have been damaged by diseases such as cervical cancer. Up to 200 women in the UK are said to use surrogate mothers each year.

In the latest research conducted at the Royal Veterinary College in London, five rabbits were given a womb using a technique which connected major blood vessels, including the aorta.

Two of the rabbits lived to 10 months, with examinations after death indicating the transplants had been a success. This has created 'Huge interest'.

Richard Smith, consultant gynaecological surgeon at Hammersmith Hospital, told the American Society for Reproductive Medicine conference in Atlanta the team's next step would involve getting rabbits pregnant through IVF treatment. The technique would then be used on larger animals.

Other research projects in the past have carried out similar experiments on pigs, goats, sheep and monkeys but there is a big difference between demonstrating effectiveness in a rabbit and being able to do this in a larger animal or a human

Tony Rutherford, British Fertility Society
A human transplant has also been tried once before - in Saudi Arabia in 2000 - but the womb came from a live donor, and was rejected after three months. Mr Smith suggested it may have failed because surgeons had not worked out how to connect the blood vessels properly.

The UK study involved transplanting the womb with all its arteries, veins and bigger vessels. "I think there are certain technical issues to be ironed out but I think the crux of how to carry out a successful graft that's properly vascularised - I think we have cracked that one."

A transplanted womb would only stay in place long enough for a woman to have the children she wanted and any baby would have to be delivered by Caesarean section as a transplanted human womb is unlikely to be able to withstand natural labour.

Conception would also need to be through IVF because women with a transplanted womb could be at higher risk of ectopic pregnancy.

Mr Smith acknowledged the procedures were seen as "a step too far in terms of fertility management" among the medical profession but said interest from patients was huge.

Tony Rutherford, chairman of the British Fertility Society, said: "I think there is a big difference between demonstrating effectiveness in a rabbit and being able to do this in a larger animal or a human..."

Clare Lewis-Jones, from Infertility Network UK, said "a great deal of thought and discussion" was needed on the issue including the ethical ramifications.

CFS - Women, Hormone Levels and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

Women who suffer from chronic fatigue syndrome may be starting the day at a disadvantage. A new study finds that they wake up with lower levels of a hormone that helps people deal with stress.

The researchers, writing online in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, said the low levels of the hormone, cortisol, might play a role in the severe fatigue found in many patients with the syndrome.

The findings are based on a comparison of cortisol levels in about 700 volunteers, some with the syndrome and some without, who agreed to take saliva samples when they woke up, a half-hour later and again a half-hour after that.

It has long been believed that cortisol levels play a role in the syndrome, but for this study researchers focused on taking samples from a broad segment of the general population. They also made a point of having the samples taken on a normal workday, said Dr. William C. Reeves of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an author of the study.

The cortisol differences were not found in the men studied.

''We were surprised that the effect was limited to women,'' Dr. Reeves said in an e-mail message, ''and this may help to explain the higher prevalence of C.F.S. in women.''

The Right Stuff but the Wrong Sex

Imagine if the first person on the moon had proclaimed, “That’s one small step for a woman, one giant leap for mankind.”

It could have happened and many say it should have. In the late 1950s, the United States government contemplated training women as astronauts, and newly released medical test results show that they were just as cool and tough as the men who went to the moon.

“They were all extraordinary women and outstanding pilots and great candidates for what was proposed,” said Donald Kilgore, a doctor who evaluated both male and female space flight candidates at the Lovelace Clinic, a mid-century center of aeromedical research. “They came out better than the men in many categories.”

The clinic’s founder, Randy Lovelace, developed the health assessments used to select the Mercury 7 team, and thought that women might make competent astronauts. It was a radical idea for the era. Women’s liberation had just begun to stir, and only a quarter of U.S. women had jobs.

But Lovelace was practical: These women were lighter than men, and required less fuel to transport them into space. They’re also less prone to heart attacks, and Lovelace considered them better-suited for the claustrophobic isolation of space.

WISP
In 1959, Lovelace collaborator Donald Flickinger, an Air Force general and NASA advisor, founded the Women In Space Earliest program in order to test women for their qualifications as astronauts but the Air Force canned it before testing even started, prompting Lovelace to start the Woman in Space Program.

Nineteen women enrolled in WISP, undergoing the same grueling tests administered to the male Mercury astronauts. Thirteen of them — later dubbed the Mercury 13 — passed “with no medical reservations,” a higher graduation rate than the first male class. The top four women scored as highly as any of the men.

“They were all motivated to a degree you could not measure. They knew they were ideal candidates, but NASA regulations kept them out of the game,” said Kilgore.

The results of the women’s tests are described for the first time in an article published in the September Advances in Physiology Education, and show just how capable they. One set of results, from the sensory deprivation tests, are especially striking.

Sensory Deprivation
“Based on previous experiments in several hundred subjects, it was thought that 6 hours was the absolute limit of tolerance for this experience before the onset of hallucinations,” write Kilgore and his co-authors. “[Jerrie] Cobb, however, spent 9 hours and 40 minutes during the experiment, which was terminated by the staff. Subsequently, two other women (Rhea Hurrle and Wally Funk) were also tested, with each spending over 10 hours in the sensory isolation tank before termination by the staff.”

During the test, the women were immersed in a lightless tank of cold water. By contrast, John Glenn’s memoir recounts being tested in a dimly-lit room, where he was provided with a pen and paper. Glenn’s test lasted just three hours.

The would-be Mercury 13 astronauts would ultimately be held to a different standard than their male counterparts. Some NASA officials speculated that female performance could be impaired by menstruation. Others wanted pilots who had already flown experimental military aircraft — something only men could have done, since women were barred from the Air Force.

In August 1961, WISP was cancelled. It was not until 1995, when Eileen Collins piloted the STS-63 shuttle around the MIR space station, that the Mercury 13 met again. Collins was the first woman to become a space pilot, but not the first woman who deserved to.

“They knew it was a long shot, but they were willing to take it,” said Kilgore. “They were very special people.”

Obesity is the leading cause of Cancer in Western Women

Being obese is nothing to sing about. Obesity is fast becoming the leading cause of cancer in women in Western countries, European researchers said Thursday.

Being overweight or obese accounts for up to 8% of cancers in Europe. Experts said that figure is poised to increase substantially, as the obesity epidemic continues.

This is partly caused by a decrease in the other major causes of cancer, such as smoking and hormone replacement therapy for menopausal women. These causes have dropped or been reduced, dramatically.

"Obesity is catching up at a rate that makes it possible it could become the biggest attributable cause of cancer in women within the next decade," said Andrew Renehan, a cancer expert at the University of Manchester. Renehan presented his findings to a joint meeting of the European Cancer Organisation and the European Society for Medical Oncology in Berlin on Thursday.

Renehan and colleagues designed a model to estimate the number of cancers that could be blamed on being fat in 30 European countries. In 2002, they calculated that 70,000 cases of cancer out of about 2 million cancer cases were attributable to being overweight or obese. By 2008, the number had jumped to at least 124,000.

Colorectal cancer, breast cancer in menopausal women and endometrial cancer accounted for 65% of all cancers linked to being fat. Renehan said that in the U.S., some studies found obesity was responsible for up to 20% of cancers.

European health experts said the results will shape future cancer policies across Europe.

"Being overweight or obese is one of the biggest single causes of cancer after smoking," said Lucy Boyd, an epidemiologist at Cancer Research United Kingdom who was not linked to the research.

Scientists aren't sure why being fat boosts your cancer risk, but suspect it is connected to hormones. As people become fatter, they produce more hormones like estrogen that help tumors grow. People with big bellies also have more acid in their stomachs, which can lead to stomach, intestinal or esophageal cancer.

Fabiola Gianotti at the LHC

Next month Fabiola Gianotti takes over as head of ATLAS at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland. The largest experiment of its kind, it could answer some of the mysteries of the universe. (New Scientist interview)