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When women are in the mood to make a baby
Catherine McDiarmid-Watt |
Tuesday, February 13, 2007 |
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IT MIGHT seem unlikely, but the mood swings many women experience every month may serve an evolutionary purpose - to get them pregnant.
Levels of sex hormones such as oestrogen and progesterone fluctuate throughout the monthly cycle. During the follicular phase at the start of the cycle, the egg is maturing and the body releases oestrogen, while during the luteal phase, when a fertilised egg might implant, progesterone is secreted.
To see how these might influence the brain, Jean-Claude Dreher and colleagues at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, used functional MRI to look at how brain activity changes over the course of the month.
The team scanned the brains of 15 women at different stages in their menstrual cycle as they played a game with hypothetical prizes of money. During the follicular phase, the orbitofrontal cortex, an area of the brain associated with decision making and ...
Source: http://www.newscientist.com/channel/sex/mg19325894.600-when-women-are-in-the-mood-to-make-a-baby.html
Category:
Hormones,
sex
About Catherine: I am mom to three grown sons, two grandchildren and two rescue dogs. After years of raising my boys as a single mom, I remarried a wonderful man who had never had a child of his own. Unexpectedly, I found myself pregnant at 49!
Sadly we lost that precious baby at 8 weeks, and decided to try again. Five more losses, turned down for donor egg, foster care and adoption due to my age and losses - we have accepted that there will be no more babies in our house.
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