Anxiety Attack Panic Treatment For Women
Young women are less sensitive to stress than men. But after menopause, it is rather the reverse. Must we conclude that female hormones have a calming effect? Between gender war and war stress.
The German team of Dr. Oliver Wolf is interested in phenomena that influence stress reactions, such as age, sex and hormonal secretions. To this end, she has just completed a study 1 in 58 students of both sexes aged 20 to 30 years in perfect health.
Women and stressDans Initially, 22 of these volunteers had to learn a list of words. They were then faced with a stressful experience, especially for poorer mental math: counting down from 17 in number from 17 to 2043. Finally, they had to quote again the words heard in public. The other 36 students participated in the test memory without being subjected to stress test and thus served as controls.
Meanwhile, researchers measured the concentration of cortisol in saliva before and 10 minutes after the test. Produced by the adrenal glands, this hormone plays a major role in classical phenomena of stress.
Young men more susceptible to stress
The main result of this study was to reveal that young men, who produce the highest amount of cortisol in response to stress, are also those in whom the memory capacities are most affected by the stress test.
However, no such phenomenon has been noted among young women who participated in the experiment. These results aroused the curiosity of researchers in previous studies had noted that the memory of women aged 50 is more affected by the elevation of cortisol associated with stress.
Estrogens reduce-stress?
To explain this difference, psychologists Düsseldorf thus emit the hypothesis that estrogens modulate the stress response. Indeed, these female hormones are secreted by the ovaries and see their rates fall after menopause.
In addition, other studies on the same team showed that the stress response of certain brain structures, such as the hypothalamus and pituitary, which are sensitive to the effects of estrogen is higher in men than in women2. A change in reaction to stress test was also observed by the German researchers in women taking the pill, which contains estrogen is known synthétiques3.
American gynecologists have also described a higher reactivity to stress, which resulted in a rise in blood pressure, postmenopausal women compared with those who are not encore4. In addition, a protective effect of estrogen was noted in postmenopausal women vis-à-vis the stress.
To confirm a theory
Still, it is still only a hypothesis and that this influence of sex hormones should be confirmed by further studies. Other teams also observe a difference in stress responses by sex, but do find however no effect of age in both women men5.