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Topic: When she is in a "didn't a, hadn't a, oughtn't a mood", perhaps it is the pill (Read 507 times) |
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Hermit
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When she is in a "didn't a, hadn't a, oughtn't a mood", perhaps it is the pill
« on: 2006-06-28 16:57:28 » |
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Can taking the pill dull a woman's desire forever?
[Hermit: Aside from turning her off by bloating her like a balloon and potentially contributing to a wealth of other problems that is. I have included this article as a prequel to the one following as both, to my mind, relate to the impact of small changes in oestrogen absorbtion, and the latter may well illuminate a mechanism for the former.]
Source: New Scientist
Authors: Not Credited
Dated: 2005-05-27
ORAL contraceptives may free a woman to have sex without fear of getting pregnant, but they could also extinguish her desire.
The pill has been associated with many side effects, including blood clots, migraines and weight gain. Perhaps least talked about is its tendency to dull libido by decreasing testosterone levels.
Contraceptive drugs curb the hormone's production in the ovaries and also raise levels of sex hormone binding globulin (SHBG), a substance that takes it out of play. But it is unclear how common problems are in pill users. Until now, any sexual dysfunction, including loss of libido, muted or non-existent orgasms or painful intercourse, was thought to be reversible when women stopped taking the drug.
Irwin Goldstein, Claudia Panzer and their colleagues at Boston University studied 125 young women who attended a sexual dysfunction clinic. Sixty-two of them were taking oral contraceptives, 40 had previously taken them and 23 had never taken them. The team measured levels of SHBG in the women every three months for a year, and found that in pill users they were seven times as high as in women who had never taken them. Levels had declined a bit in women who had stopped taking the pill, but remained three to four times as high as in those who had never taken it, the researchers told a meeting of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists in Washington DC last week. "There's the possibility it is imprinting a woman for the rest of her life," says Goldstein.
Seat of female libido revealed
Source: New Scientist
Journal: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0603045103)
Authors: Andy Coghlan
Dated: 2006-06-26
Noticed By: Jonathan Davis
The precise part of the brain likely to be the seat of heterosexual desire in women has been revealed by experiments on mice.
The study confirms that the hormone oestrogen is vital for arousal, but only in the specific area of the brain called the ventromedial nucleus (VMN) in the hypothalamus.
Sonoko Ogawa of the University of Tsukuba in Japan and her collaborators in the US discovered this by blocking the effects of oestrogen exclusively in that part of the brain in mice. They did this with tiny slugs of genetic material called small hairpin RNAs designed to block production of oestrogen receptor alpha, the molecule where oestrogen docks on cells in the VMN and elsewhere in the body.
They used a harmless virus to shuttle the RNAs exclusively into the VMN, so that oestrogen signals would only be blocked there and nowhere else in the body. The effect was dramatic - the females refused to have sex.
“They became extremely aggressive towards males, and started biting and kicking when males approached,” says Ogawa. The females refused to mate and none of them showed the usual signs of sexual receptivity. By contrast, control females injected with neutral RNAs mated as usual. View a video of the normal mice (top) and those in which sexual receptivity was blocked (bottom).
"Disruption of normal oestrogen signalling only in this region while leaving it intact elsewhere in the brain and the rest of the body is sufficient to completely block normal female courtship behaviour," says Ogawa.
She says that the VMN has long been suspected to be the seat of female desire, but experiments in mice genetically engineered to have no oestrogen receptor alpha anywhere in the body failed to prove this because they affected all receptors, not just those in the VMN. Blocking signals just in the VMN has now shown “unambiguously” that this is where female sexual behaviour is controlled, say the researchers.
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