Females Handle Stress Better Than Males
United Press International - November 13, 2001
SAN DIEGO, Calif., Nov 13, 2001 (United Press International via COMTEX) -- In the wake of terrorist attacks, plane crashes and the war in Afghanistan, many Americans may feel more stressed than usual. New evidence shows that women handle stress better than their male counterparts.
The findings, released Tuesday at the Society for Neuroscience Meeting in San Diego, suggest that chronic and acute stress may impact male memory and coping function more dramatically.
German researchers from the University of Duesseldorf found that 58 young subjects exposed to a psychosocial stressor showed different memory impairment depending upon their gender. Men who showed a greater stress response had more difficulty performing a memory test after the stressful incident than female subjects.
The researchers suspect their findings point to the benefit of female sex hormones in blunting the impact of stress.
"These data -- together with a previous study from our laboratory observing a more pronounced stress susceptibility in older (post-menopausal) women compared to older men -- point towards a potential role of the female sex hormone estradiol as an 'anti-stress' hormone," said Dr. Oliver Wolf, lead author.
The researchers believe that estrogen replacement therapy may help aging women retain memory function after menopause and should be considered as a therapeutic option for memory-impaired patients.
In times of high stress and anxiety, people often seek out social support. But a second study shows that women, and not men, may be the only ones who benefit from more social interaction after a stressful event.
Researchers from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands studied male and female rats that were exposed to chronic stress and then housed either individually or in unisex groups of four rats.
They found that the group housing prevented stress-induced behavior in the females but not in the males. In fact, social housing appeared to increase the observed stress effects in the male rates.
"This suggests that social support can reduce the effects of chronic stress in female rats but not in male rats, similar to the results observed in women," said lead author Dr. Christel Westenbroek. It may be that the male rats tried to impose a dominance hierarchy in the group setting which served to increase the stress level.
Interestingly, rats housed in mixed-gender pairs showed no improvement for either females or males.
"The bottom line is that male and female brains are different ...and they're going to have different responses to stress," said Dr. Bruce McEwen of Rockefeller University. We may all realize this from subjective experience but this is now finally being quantified, he said.