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Women are almost twice as likely as men to suffer from major depression, a mental illness that can lead to death and accompany chronic medical illnesses. BWH researchers are beginning groundbreaking work to understand what causes differences between men and women in mental illness, specifically depression, which they believe begins in the womb.
“During pregnancy, sex hormones flood the fetal brain, which, along with genes, develop certain brain regions differently in males and females,” said Jill Goldstein, PhD, director of Research at the Connors Center for Women’s Health and Gender Biology and professor of Psychiatry and Medicine, who is leading a multi-institutional group of researchers on this study. “Vulnerability for certain adult onset diseases also occurs at this time. We believe that disrupting the normal ways that men and women’s brains develop differently will create the vulnerability for differences between men and women in adult brain abnormalities in regions which we know are important for understanding disorders like depression.”
Goldstein is the principal investigator of BWH’s Specialized Center of Research (SCOR) on Sex and Gender Factors Affecting Women’s Health, established with a $5 million grant awarded to the hospital from the NIH Office of Research on Women’s Health in September. This SCOR will use human studies and animal models to determine fetal risk factors for gender differences in depression. BWH is home to the human study, and animal studies are being conducted at Colorado State University.
BWH researchers are studying 1,000 participants from the New England sites of the National Collaborative Perinatal Project, a longitudinal study that began in the 1960s with mothers followed throughout their pregnancies to identify obstetric risk factors for neurologic diseases in children. Goldstein and her colleagues, who have followed these adult children for the last 15 years in multiple studies, identified 500 cases with major depression and 500 healthy participants who will participate in this SCOR.
“We are studying samples of maternal blood during pregnancy to uncover gender differences in genetic and hormonal factors in their offspring that may explain why women are almost two times more likely to suffer from major depression than men,” Goldstein said.
The researchers aim to translate their findings into gender-specific drug therapies or other treatments for major depression.