Descripción del proyecto
Las píldoras anticonceptivas y el encéfalo
Hoy en día, cerca de 200 millones de mujeres, lo que incluye un creciente número de adolescentes, utilizan anticonceptivos orales. Aunque las píldoras anticonceptivas llegaron al mercado hace sesenta años, nunca se han estudiado en profundidad sus efectos en el encéfalo. La pregunta es si sus efectos en algunas áreas del encéfalo, como el hipocampo, pueden provocar cambios irreversibles, sobre todo en el caso de las adolescentes. El proyecto BECONTRA, financiado con fondos europeos, está llevando a cabo los primeros estudios longitudinales en distintos puntos temporales del tratamiento anticonceptivo. Utilizará un diseño de imágenes multimodal y un muestreo adecuado para responder a cómo los anticonceptivos orales modifican la actividad cerebral y si los diferentes tipos de píldoras pueden causar efectos irreversibles. El proyecto se centrará especialmente en los efectos de las píldoras anticonceptivas en las adolescentes.
Objetivo
Birth control pills have been on the market for almost 60 years now and are used by almost 200 million women worldwide. Particularly, the use of birth control pills increases among adolescents. However, the effects of birth control pills on the brain have widely been ignored. It was my own research that found the first indication that birth control pills affect female brain structure and masculinize female brain function. Furthermore, I recently obtained evidence that these changes are strongly dependent on the type of synthetic hormone contained in birth control pills and might affect some brain areas, like the hippocampus, beyond the duration of contraceptive treatment. This poses the question, whether effects of birth control pills on the brain are fully reversible after women stop taking the pill, especially if pill use occurs during sensitive periods of brain development, like in adolescents.
Previous studies suffer from small sample sizes and insufficient study designs. Importantly, they compare women on birth control pills to naturally cycling women (cross-sectional designs) rather than following the same women from before she starts taking the pill through the first months of her pill use and vice versa (longitudinal designs). Accordingly they may be confounded by sampling bias.
Therefore the general aims of this proposal are (A) to study the effects of birth control pills on the brain – for the first time – systematically in a longitudinal design, and (B) to address whether the effects of birth control pills on the brain are fully reversible. I seek to link changes in the brain to changes in behaviour, and address whether different types of pills cause different effects. Most importantly, a specific focus will lie on teen use of birth control pills. In order to address these questions, this project will employ a multi-modal imaging design, following several groups of pill users over multiple time-points before, during and after contraceptive treatment.
Palabras clave
Programa(s)
Régimen de financiación
ERC-STG - Starting GrantInstitución de acogida
5020 Salzburg
Austria