Emily Jacobs wants to know how sex hormones shape the brain
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When Emily Jacobs embarked on a career in brain research in the early 2000s, a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) attracted a lot of attention. “Just as we have super-powerful telescopes that can quantify the farthest reaches of the known universe, here we have this tool that allows us to see the entire human brain as a pulsating, living organ,” says Jacobs. says. Neuroscientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
By measuring changes in blood flow, which act as a proxy for brain activity, neuroscientists can determine how different situations promote speech between brain regions, and how the intensity of speech changes over time. “I was on that wave of excitement,” says Jacobs.
But she soon realized there was a big, unasked question. It is an important issue for half of the world’s population. Do the natural hormonal changes associated with menstruation, pregnancy, and menopause affect communication across the brain? What about hormonal contraceptives, such as the birth control pills used by hundreds of millions of people worldwide? And what does that mean for brain health and behavior?
big goal
Hormonal fluctuations are a major reason why women have historically been excluded from biomedical research, even though men’s hormones also fluctuate. Poor physical and reproductive health care. “Science, especially neuroscience, is not serving men and women equally,” says Jacobs.
Jacobs’ lab uses a variety of tools, including fMRI, other types of MRI and brain imaging, blood tests, neuropsychological tests, and virtual reality, to understand how hormones work in the human brain. It tries to fill a gap in our basic understanding of what And she studies hormones as a lens for larger questions about brain changes.
“What’s really special about Emily’s work is that she does it on so many different levels,” says Caterina Gratton, a cognitive neuroscientist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. said like this.
outstanding research
In a series of studies dubbed 28 and Me, covering the 28 days of a typical menstrual cycle, Jacobs and colleagues closely monitored the brain during a woman’s natural menstrual cycle. Every 24 hours for 30 days, this woman in her 20s had her brain scanned, her blood hormone levels checked, and her mood assessed.
When a woman’s estrogen levels peaked during ovulation, regions across the brain synchronized. Additionally, portions of this network were reorganized to create new temporary communication cliques. After ovulation, a drop in estrogen levels and a spike in progesterone levels caused a transient expansion of gray matter in brain structures associated with learning and memory.
When the same woman taking the progesterone-quenching pill was examined a year later, no changes were observed.
Findings described in 2021 Current opinion in behavioral scienceprovide strong evidence that sex hormone ebbs and flows drive daily brain changes, say Jacobs and colleagues. I also confirmed something.
what’s next
This observation led cognitive neuroscientist Caitlin Taylor, a postdoc in Jacobs’ lab, to wonder how the brain responds to chronic hormonal suppression from oral contraceptive use. rice field. The team has launched a large-scale investigation to try to find out.
Initially, Jacobs was hesitant to approve the study. She feared it would twist and undermine her access to contraception, she relented, because after all, women “deserve to have science that works for us.”
Another initiative that Jacobs and Taylor are building is to make data from such large studies more widely available. The project, called the University of California Women’s Brain Initiative, aims to infuse records from her eight brain-imaging research centers in the university system into an open-access database. When a woman scans her brain at one of her centers, anonymized brain imaging data, medical data, and information about her use of hormonal contraceptives are entered into a database. With all eight centers participating, there could be about 10,000 participants each year.
The expected mountain of data should be a boon to researchers asking big and small questions about brain health, says Jacobs. And she hopes it will improve women’s health care.
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