The human brain’s response to stress can be reduced by a steroid hormone, known as Progesterone metabolite allopregnanolone, which gets released during progesterone (the female sex hormone) metabolism.
Evidence was cited by scientists demonstrating that response of the brain to a peptide hormone, which exercise a critical role in the stress response in animals, corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF), gets reduced by progesterone metabolite allopregnanolone.
From News-medical.net:
In the study, Emory researchers Donna Toufexis, PhD, Michael Davis, PhD and Carrie Davis, BS, and Alexis Hammond, BS, of Spelman College, compared how female rats with different levels of the sex hormones, estrogen and progesterone, reacted to loud noises after injections of CRF into the brain’s lateral ventricles. CRF injections usually increase the “acoustic startle response” in this test used to gauge stress and anxiety, a phenomenon called CRF-enhanced startle.
In the first experiment, the scientists compared acoustic startle responses after CRF injection in an estrogen-only group, an estrogen-plus-progesterone group and a control group that did not receive any sex hormones. All the rats lacked ovaries and the ability to produce sex hormones naturally. Acoustic startle response was unaffected in the estrogen-only group and the control group. In the estrogen-plus-progesterone group, however, CRF-enhanced startle was significantly lower than in the other groups.
The finding was disclosed by scientists at Emory University School of Medicine, the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, and Atlanta’s Center for Behavioral Neuroscience.
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