Worldwide, more than 150 million women use oral contraceptives. Combination OCs (COCs), which are made of artificial hormones, are the most common type. It has been demonstrated that the brain network involved in processing fear is influenced by sex hormones. The long-term effects of COC use as well as the impact of synthetic and naturally occurring sex hormones on fear-related brain regions—the neural circuitry in the brain that processes fear—have recently been investigated by a team of Canadian researchers.
“In our study, we show that healthy women currently using COCs had a thinner ventromedial prefrontal cortex than men,” said Alexandra Brouillard, a researcher at Universite du Quebec a Montreal and first author of the study published in Frontiers in Endocrinology.
“This part of the prefrontal cortex is thought to sustain emotion regulation, such as decreasing fear signals in the context of a safe situation. Our result may represent a mechanism by which COCs could impair emotion regulation in women.”