Major depressive disorder affects women twice as often as men, but researchers are still attempting to discover the explanation why. Researchers at Michigan State University have recently received a $3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to proceed their investigation of how female and male brains respond to emphasize in a different way and the way testosterone may very well be the important thing to increasing resilience.
The National Institute of Mental Health has begun to have a look at biological sex as a variable that might help explain some mental health disparities. Since 2016, A.J. Robison, an associate professor within the College of Natural Science and director of MSU’s Neuroscience Program, and his team have been studying the results of stress on the brain and discovered that sex and testosterone play a job.
Through earlier research, we found there may be a particular brain circuit within the hippocampus that’s more excitable in female mice than in males. That circuit is regulated by testosterone.”
A.J. Robison, Associate Professor, College of Natural Science
Robison’s team includes his wife, Michelle Mazei-Robison, a co-principal investigator on the grant and associate chair of the physiology department within the College of Natural Science, together with graduate students Elizabeth “Liz” Williams, Claire Manning, Ivana Lakic and Chiho Sugimoto. Their research has shown that testosterone reduces the excitability of this brain circuit.
“I’m really excited to be a component of this revolutionary project to dissect mechanisms that contribute to sex differences in stress resiliency,” Mazei-Robison said. “These studies have the potential to discover targets that may very well be leveraged towards novel therapeutic strategies to treat mood disorders.”
Since testosterone is central to many functions within the body, the reply just isn’t so simple as giving someone with depression a testosterone boost. By identifying how testosterone affects neurons within the circuit through either -; the signaling on the cell’s surface or binding DNA within the cell’s nucleus -; researchers can develop and leverage novel targets to treat depression in each sexes.
“Now, we would like to understand how testosterone is causing this modification within the brain circuitry,” Robison said. “If we will figure that out, perhaps one in every of those things is something we will use to create a female- or male-specific pharmacological treatment for depression.”
This research has also spawned latest studies in related areas. For instance, Andrew Eagle, a research associate within the Department of Physiology at MSU and former postdoctoral fellow of Robison, is studying how this same brain circuit is connected to the rewarding effects and relapse behaviors related to cocaine use within the hopes of finding latest treatments for substance use disorder.
Source:
Michigan State University