Science says that women are more stressed than men

“Why are you so nervous? Do you have your own things?” How many times have we women heard it, with little or no discomfort, when something went wrong and we appeared particularly nervous? Many, perhaps too many. But this time this cliché can be confirmed by science. According to Swedish research published in the journal Natural neuroscience And report it il france, Women are more prone to anxiety and stress than men, and the reasons must be sought in our hormones. According to the French Ministry of Health, 21% of adults between the ages of 18 and 65 will suffer from serious diseases in their lives, with a double risk for the female sex. Let’s try to understand why.

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An experiment conducted by some Swedish researchers on mice has shed light on neurons and neurons that are involved in creating negative emotional states and chronic stress. The neural pathway that is activated in these situations is located between the hypothalamus and pubic region. “We had detected this link between the hypothalamus and eels in a previous study, but we didn’t know which types of neurons the pathway consists of,” said Konstantinos Miletis, a professor in the Department of Neurosciences at Karolinska Institutet. Although it has been known for several years Women are more prone to anxiety and depression than menNo biological mechanism has yet explained this. “Now we’ve found a mechanism that can at least explain these sex differences in mice,” says Marie Carlin, one of the study’s authors.

According to the results of this work, the neurons involved in stress have an estrogen receptor, which explains why women are more sensitive to it.. “When male and female mice were exposed to the same type of unexpected mild negative event, the female mice developed a significantly longer stress response than the males,” the study says. It’s not that anxiety doesn’t have a specific physiological function: in fact, it serves to signal dangerous or unpleasant situations, causing more adrenaline to enter the bloodstream causing an increase in heart rate, sweating and blood pressure. The problem arises when the activation condition is excessive and permanent; In this case, it can lead to pathological conditions and lead to panic attacks and phobias.

An over-activated state can lead to pathological conditions.

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Apparently, women naturally feel more anxious than men because of the difference in serotonin regulation, which is caused by changing estrogen levels and which in turn depends on the different phases of the cycle. The goal now is to be able to “understand how negative signals are generated in the brain”, and only in this way will it also be possible to “find mechanisms behind emotional illnesses such as depression, which will pave the way for new drug therapies”. The mind is as wonderful a world as it is mysterious, and fortunately research continues to take precious steps forward.