Estrogen makes women better equipped to deal with stress, researchers say

Jul 11, 2013 14:46 GMT  ·  By

When compared to men, women have a much easier time coping with stress. Interestingly enough, this is not because they take the time to teach themselves to keep calm under stressful circumstances, but because of the estrogen that is rushing through their bodies.

British scientists maintain that said hormone has a positive effect on the female brain.

Thus, estrogen appears to block the neural pathways that are usually active when a person's brain begins to respond to environmental stress.

Several other studies have shown that, when men and women are faced with equally stressful situations, the first are more affected by the unpleasant circumstances they find themselves in than the latter.

Still, the biological and molecular mechanisms that spawn this major difference between men and women remained unknown for a lengthy period of time.

“Previous studies have found that females are more resilient to chronic stress and now our research has found the reason why.

“We have examined the molecular mechanism underlying gender-specific effects of stress,” Dr. Zhen Yan from the University of Buffalo commented on his and his colleagues' investigation, as cited by Daily Mail.

The researchers base their claim that estrogen makes women better equipped to deal with stress on data collected while carrying out a series of experiments on mice.

They say that, when the male and female mice were faced with stressful circumstances, the first had a more difficult time coping and eventually suffered damage in a brain area known to control short-term memory, attention, decision-making and other such processes.

The females only experienced these symptoms when the scientists toyed with the estrogen levels that their brains were exposed to.

“When estrogen signalling in the brains of females was blocked, stress exhibited detrimental effects on them. When estrogen signalling was activated in males, the detrimental effects of stress were blocked,” Dr. Yan says.

The scientists expect that their findings will one day help develop better treatment options for patients suffering with chronic stress.