Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Women who are trying to kick the smoking habit as part of a New Year’s resolution should pay special attention to their menstrual cycle, experts from the University of Montreal and the Institut universitaire en santé mentale de Montréal claim in a recently-published study.
As associate professor Adrianna Mendrek and her colleagues explained in research published last October in the Psychiatry Journal, more males than females tend to smoke cigarettes, but it typically takes women and girls less time to become dependent on the products after first using them. Women also tend to have more problems quitting the habit, the authors said.
Mendrek’s team believes that one of the reasons that women appear to crave cigarettes more than men is the influence of hormonal fluctuations across their menstrual cycles. So they set out to examine potential gender-related differences in functional neuroanatomy of craving, and to see if there was any correlation between the desire to smoke cigarettes and a woman’s period.
“Our data reveal that incontrollable urges to smoke are stronger at the beginning of the follicular phase that begins after menstruation,” she explained Sunday in a statement. “Hormonal decreases of estrogen and progesterone possibly deepen the withdrawal syndrome and increase activity of neural circuits associated with craving.”
As a result, it could be easier for women to overcome abstinence-related withdrawl symptoms after ovulation (during the mid-luteal phase), when they have elevated estrogen and progesterone levels, Mendrek said. However, she added that psycho-social factors cannot be excluded, as the women who took part in the study were specifically asked about their menstrual cycle phases.
Mendrek’s team recruited 34 men and women, each of whom smoked at least 15 cigarettes each day, and had them fill out questionnaires and undergo MRI brain scans. The MRIs were taken as the subjects looked either at neutral pictures or images than made them want to smoke.
Female participants were scanned twice (once at the beginning of the follicular phase of their menstrual cycle and then again at the mid-luteal phase), and their estrogen and progesterone levels were also measured.
While the authors found no significant gender-related differences in their neuronal circuits, they did find that activation patterns varied considerably in the women over the course of their menstrual cycles. Specific regions of their frontal, temporal and parietal cortex revealed greater activation during the follicular phase, while limited activation was recorded in the hippocamp during the luteal phase.
While previous research discovered gender-related differences in rats, with females becoming addicted more quickly than males and willing to work harder for equal doses of nicotine. Those observations led Mendrek and her associates to conclude that human females may also face a higher risk of addiction, and that sex hormones could be the reason why.
However, they explained that in humans, it is difficult to determine these things because each case is unique in terms of tobacco use, personal history, personality, environment and social situation. In particular, Mendrek noted that “stress, anxiety and depression” were likely the most important factors to take into consideration.
Ultimately, though, she said that the new research indicates that “taking the menstrual cycle into consideration could help women to stop smoking,” adding that she hopes that her team’s findings will encourage scientists to focus more on biology when developing research protocols. Doing so “should enable us to better target treatment according to the smokers profile,” she noted.
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