14 DAY TRIAL // According to the results of a new scientific investigation conducted by researchers at the University of California in Irvine (UCI), it would appear that women who use birth control remember the main idea of emotional events more clearly than peers who do not use the pills.
Conversely, those who use other means of contraception are better at remembering the details of those events, the investigators say. The correlation only holds true in the case of women who use hormonal contraceptives. No one suspected the link was there until now.
One thing that investigators wanted to make clear from the get-go is that this investigation is in no way suggesting that birth control pills damage memory. What they do is cause a change in the type of information the brain prefers to store.
UCI graduate research Shawn Nielsen says that this is not a deficit in any way. In a new paper accompanying the study, he explains the nature of the correlation the researchers discovered.
Contraceptive pills work by suppressing the expression of hormones such as estrogen and progesterone, which play a significant role in reproduction. However, the chemicals have also been linked to the strong “left brain” memory women display.
Nielsen explains that birth control pills no longer cause the aforementioned boost in that particular part of the brain, but somewhere else. “What’s most exciting about this study is that it shows the use of hormonal contraception alters memory,” the expert says.
“There are only a handful of studies examining the cognitive effects of the pill, and more than 100 million women use it worldwide,” he adds, quoted by PsychCentral. The expert says that this study might help explain why women develop post-traumatic stress syndrome more often than men.
Women and men have been known to recall things in different manners for many years. “This new finding may be surprising to some, but it’s a natural outgrowth of the research we’ve been doing on sex differences for 10 years,” UCI neurobiologist Larry Cahill goes on to say.
“Larry Cahill is already well known for his phenomenal research linking sex to memory. The fact that women on oral contraceptives remembered different elements of a story tells us that estrogen has an influence on how women remember emotional events,” comments Pauline Maki.
The University of Illinois in Chicago professor of psychiatry and psychology, who was not a part of the new investigation, specializes in memory and brain functioning herself.