Hey hey,
I wanna tell you a story connected to the lives of women.
Sssoooo, earlier this year,
I was invited to the INTEGHRAL Hub in Kampala by my two friends, Professor Monica Swahn and Kato Charles Chandia.
It was for a “meet-and-learn” interaction with a team of Professors who are working on a very interesting project here, that includes the impact of stress on the female brain!
Photo credit: LinkedIn
That was where I met and interacted with Professor Ebony Glover.
She was one of the Professors that had come to Uganda for their work on the project.
She shared with her presentation titled, “Using Translational Models of Fear Conditioning to Uncover Sex-Linked Factors Related to PTSD Risk”.
Photo credit: LinkedIn
A simple study was done in the United States in 1994 on the “lifetime and 12-month prevalence of DSM-III-R psychiatric disorders”.
These disorders included panic disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, agoraphobia, and PTSD.
The results for each of these disorders tested and observed showed double digits in women, for their lifetime prevalence and suffering.
Photo credit: CNN
When it comes to the number of presentations made on the female and male brains respectively on learning and memory, fear conditioning as well as fear extinction…it all goes down hill from there.
- When it comes to learning and memory, there is over 12,000 known publications on the male brain and only 192 known publications for the female brain!
- When it comes to fear conditioning, there are over 4,200 known publications on the male brain and 76 known publications on the female brain!
- When it comes to fear extinction, there are over 1,200 known publications on the male brain and only 22 known publications on the female brain!
Professor Ebony says that there are substantial structural, cellular, and molecular differences between the male and female brain.
Furthermore, symptoms of anxiety typically occur after the onset of puberty and during periods of estrogen fluctuations.
Women are more anxious during premenstrual, postpartum, and perimenopausal periods!
Photo credit: LinkedIn
Do you see all those figures I shared above, from those studies?
They indicate one thing:
Serious understudy of the female brain and total reliance on the male brain as the metric for learning about the brain.
We need to seriously do something about this mishap!