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Since the late 19th century, there has been a general consensus in the scientific community that men perform better than women on space missions, while women excel at thought-related academic tasks. verbal meaning, while there is a general debate as to why there is a difference.
“The surprising conclusion from our results is that the polarity of sex differences in the hippocampus and related learning is reversed in girls and boys from before to after puberty.” Dr. Christine Gall, co-author, distinguished professor and chair of the department of anatomy. and neurobiology at the UCI School of Medicine.
“This occurs due to distinct developmental changes. Plasticity thresholds and spatial information encoding increase in females and decrease in males.”
Puberty is a major milestone in brain maturation and leads to many sex differences in behavior, but little is known about how it affects the substrate for encoding memory..
Researchers have identified a mechanism by which women increase LTP levels and decrease spatial memory before and after puberty. Sex differences have been demonstrated for hippocampal-based processes and driven by different underlying mechanisms.
In women only, inhibitory syncope in the CA1 field of the hippocampus showed increased levels of GABAA receptors containing the a5 subunit. This increase is associated with synaptic plasticity and increased inhibition of synaptic plasticity and memory. The A5 receptors are involved in anxiety, which can be altered early in the estrous cycle. The researchers found that pharmacological inhibition of a5-GABAA receptors restored LTP and memory encoding in females to prepubertal levels. “Our group suggests that the emerging female role model may favor learning in complex situations while the emerging male model favors the rapid acquisition of simpler materials. This suggests that optimal teaching strategies should reflect previously unsuspected brain differences between the sexes and how they are significantly modulated during puberty,” says Gall.
“Most studies have started with the analysis of young adult male rodents. Females use slightly different memory mechanisms than males and so may respond differently to drugs and mutations. genetic modification. Therapeutic treatments and their applications at different life stages.”
Further research will be conducted to determine whether changes in sex-specific LTP ranges identified in the hippocampus during postnatal life are evident in other areas of the brain and affect the encoding of different types of memory..
Anatomy & Neurobiology Fellow Aliza Le, Researcher Julie Lauterborn, Project Scientist Yousheng Jia, Project Support Scientist Weisheng Wang, Postdoctoral Researcher Conor Cox, Professor psychiatry & human behavior and co-author Gary Lynch, all from the UCI School of Medicine, contributed to this study.
This work was funded by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health T32-MH119049-02; Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development HD-089491; National Science Foundation grant BCS-1941216; National Institute on Drug Abuse issued DA-044118; Office of Naval Research Grant N00014182114; and the National Institutes of Health issued T32 AG00096-34.
Source: Medindia
