Women’s brains are more sensitive to the action of a hormone that orchestrates the body’s response to stress, according to a new study carried out in Philadelphia (USA) and published in the journalMolecular Psychiatry. Men, on the other hand, can adapt their neurons to resist its effects. To carry out their research, the scientists used male and female laboratory rats, which they exposed to stressful situations and then measured their levels of brain activity. In this way, the team led by Rita Valentino discovered that female neurons are more sensitive to the molecular signals emitted by a hormone calledcorticotropin releasing factor (CRF). This hormone, discovered in the eighties, is responsible for initiating the stress response.
Thus, by having a greater number of receptors for this substance,female neurons are more likely than male to react and trigger the stress process. Although the study was carried out in rodents, the neuroscientist Rita Valentino, the main author of the study, affirms that it allows to explain whywomen are twice as prone to stress as men.
On the other hand, Valentino and his colleagues have found that when they suffer from chronic stress,males adapt their brain mechanisms to cope with stress more efficiently: they reduce the number of CRF receptors, and therefore become less sensitive to the hormone and more resistant to pressure situations. In female rats this does not occur.
