Study On Male/Female Stress Response Could Improve Therapy

Male and female brain cells react differently to chronic stress, according to a joint Israeli-German study, whose results could help personalize therapy for stress-related disorders.

Prof. Alon Chen, president of the Weizmann Institute of Science, led the collaborative effort between his Rehovot-based research university and the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich to analyze the different responses of male and female brain cells to stress. 

Weizmann’s lab used an extremely high-resolution microscope, which helped researchers study individual brain cells for the first time. 

“By sequencing the RNA molecules in that part of the brain on the level of the individual cell, we were able to map the stress response in male and female mice along three main axes,” said Dr. Elena Brivio, who led the study as a postdoc student of Prof. Chen. 

Brivio said that the study “examined how each cell type in that part of the brain responds to stress, how each cell type previously exposed to chronic stress responds to a new stress experience and how these responses differ between males and females.” 

The researchers were able to interactively map the gene expressions (the process through which information in a gene becomes a function) of more than 35,000 individual brain cells.  

The study determined that different cells are more susceptible to stress in males and females, depending on the gene expression. 

This was illustrated most clearly by the oligodendrocyte cell (a cell that regulates brain activity), which was affected significantly more in males than females during  exposure to stress.

“Our findings show that, when it comes to stress-related health conditions, from depression to diabetes, it’s very important to take the sex variable into account, since it has a significant impact on how different brain cells respond to stress,” Prof. Chen explained.

Not only will the findings allow therapy for stress-related disorders like depression and anxiety to be more personalized based on sex, but the study can also pave the way to diversifying future experiments, which still commonly include only male subjects. 

“Even if a study does not specifically focus on the differences between males and females, it’s essential to include female animals in the research,” Dr. Brivio said.

The study was published in the scientific journal Cell Reports.

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