Future of Continuous Hormone Monitoring

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WNYC Studios is supported by Columbia University Press, publisher of What Science Says Aout Astrology by Carlos Orsi You may have heard the recent interview on Code Switch with Carlo Sorsi b why astrology appeals to so many people despite having no backing by scientific evidence What makes astrology so appealing and persuasive Is there any harm to believing in astrology anyway Carlos Orsi explores the importance of astrology to the history of science and the reasons it's been categorized as a pseudoscience both empathy and skepticism. Orcy illuminates the psychological and emotional mechanisms that cause people to find astrological predictions convincing. He also addresses the dangers of irrational beliefs and the risks of applying astrology to serious decisions Wide ranging and entertaining, what Science says about astrology is the first book in the new What Science says series, available now wherever books are sold. wait, you're len. Okay. or l listening to radio lab radi from W NY. One of the reasons that I come to you is maybe ten or fifteen years ago, I read popular science book. I'm not even going say the title because I think that it was like somewhat controversial afterwards. And I remember this fact and I think since I read it, I have wondered if it was true. And I've also told everybody this fact. so this is like my live which is I read that as you go through your menstrual cycle, the size or shape or makeup of your brain changes. And I remember reading that and thinking, wait brain actually physically is changing? Is that true Okay There's so much to unpack here I'm Moy Webster. This is radio Lab. And today, I can go real far back. We're going hard on a question that I have been thinking about for years It's funny as I've been thinking about this topic, everyone's like, honestly, you should just talk to Emily. Emily is a neuroscientist, a neuroendocrinologist to be precise, and she is on one of the teams that has been struggling to understand how hormones affect the brain. Because we had these like Glimpses These little flickers of what it could be doing. Watch the full pam cinematic view of how this is unfolding. That was a breakthrough Very recently Emily's lab came up with an experiment so precise, so daring It allowed them to pin down what hormones can do to our brains And here's the thing, even though the story starts with menstrual cycles It very quickly gets to the fact that women, men Whoever we are all at the mercy of a crashing swelling wash of chemicals inside of us The chemicals we call hormones So when we say hormone, maybe we just define our terms. L when we say a hormone, that's a chemical messenger. It's a chemical that is released from an endocrine gland like or ovaries, you have adrenal glands sitting on top of your kidneys, you have a thyroid gland. And then once they start producing hormones, So those hormones use your circulatory system, your blood supply as their super highway. They hit, you know almost every cell in the body and that's When you think about like, why do we even have hormones? Like why is that a thing Um I make it complicated. justust to you probably why we have hormon? Because if you're a multicellular organism, if you have more than two cells, those cells need to know how to communicate with one another so that like everything's working together and in sync And nature has figured out a really clever way to do that. and there's several ways, but hormones are one way. It just seems like a sloppy way to communicate. like I'm gonna wash you in a liquid, like a synaptic connection where there's, you know, a fiber, a cable and it's sending information from A to B feels like clean and directed and efficient, so why would we choose this bathing method? I think because you can't have wires connecting every single cell to every single other cell Yeah, it wouldd be like a scary motel where like yeah, you see the wires around the walls. Yeah. Right. So so but we have this blood supply that feeds essential nutrients and oxygen to, you know, all parts of our body. And so it's like hormones can just basically make use of what's already there in order to get Your spleen, talking to your heart, talking to your brain. Think of it like a broadcasting system. They're like the PA for the human body and they go everywhere your blood goes, including your brain which brings us back to the brain question What are hormones doing up there? The science is really, I'd say mile one of the marathon. No. inch one. inch one. Wow. We are using pretty archaic methods to understand the function of hormones in the brain. And a lot of it is correlational. L mostost of the studies take large groups of people and take one snapshot of their brain and take one blood draw. But that snapshot in time, that's not how the endocrine system works The fundamental feature is that it ebbs and flows over time. It is not static. In fact, all of its power comes from the dynamism of that system. Like my body doesn't care I'm at twenty pigograms per milliliter of Eestra dial Itres that I came from zero and I'm going to two hundred. So it's not the static level that matters, it's the change. And none of our experiments to date were capturing that change happened in the field of neuro imaging about fifteen years ago where somebody was like, wait a minute, I'm actually interested in how individuals change over time This is a friend and a collaborate grator at Stanford named Russ Polrack and he completed a project where he basically scanned himself over a hundred times and just collected everything you could possibly collect. Like how much caffeine did I have today? And how well did I sleep? And like did I have an eczema flare up? Like literally everything. This is like my dream. Yeah, yeah That study really launched this whole new way of thinking about the use of MRI to understand dynamics of the brain. So we, my group You know, here we are setitting at UC Sant Barbara And we're watching all of this great science unfold and all of a sudden it unlocks this You know, it sort of solves this major problem for us because we're like, wait a minute, we can study an individual and track this change. And so I had this brilliant graduate student in the lab Laura Pritet. Yeah, sorry, let me just I'm gonna modify my headphones also. And she was like Hey I have normal cycles. I have a summer to kill I don't really have a life. I volunteer to do this. Emily is a philosopher and I am a countountry pumpkin that's how I describe myself no better case subject than me. So our girl, Laura is actually doctor, Laura Pritchett now. Now I'm in Philly for a postdoc. But in twenty eighteen, she was a fresh faced grad student in Emily's lab. She had just started studying neuroscience in her undergrad, and she was left feeling dissatisfied. I noticed for like a week after week after week papers we were having to read only included male animals And I would pose this question of why is this only males? And I would always get this response of, oh, well, females have an estrs cycle, you know, akin to the human menstrual cycle. And that's just complicated and it's just a lot And I was like, what the fuck? like Yeah. you're studying basic features of the brain. You're also taking these findings and applying them to males and females. So the logic's not there. This doesn't make sense. and that seems pretty whack At the same time, I remember my boyfriend at the time in college, his mom was going through menopause and I loved her and she would talked to me a lot about how she would walk into a room and forget where why she was there, where her keys were, Oh you put together like a human female going through menopause and then at the same time you're seeing study after study after study doesn't have females in it, like those two things connected for you Yes, exactly Then that led me to go, okay, well, how do sex hormones influence the brain in ways that I can measure? And then you were like, I know who can be the perfect study sample. Yeahep, me. Yeah. I was like, I'll just to answer these questions, I'll just roll up my sleeves. And that's, you know, sort of how twenty eight me was born Laura named her experiment based on the twenty eight days it roughly takes to complete a single menstrual cycle. And for each one of those days, she would wake up, go to the lab, spit in the vial. I did saliva, and then I would go get my blood drawn. Mario, the phlebotomist, would poke her in the arm. We tried once to get my foot because I was a little bit too bruised up and I almost kicked him in the face. Yeah. And then I would go straight to a two hour or so MRI. We put her in a brain scanner and she had to lie totally still. We three D printed a foam headcase customed to me and I actually had them put sandbags on my legs and take straps and strap me in almost like a straight jacket. I can't believe that made you feel better. Yeah. that's I' saying I'm a weird So Laura was in there. she was under this like blanket of sandbags, and they would scan her entire brain while she was doing a series of mental exercises. We did an resting state scan, meaning recording my brain as I'm letting my mind wander and I would look at highly rewarding food for a block of, you know a minute I'd look at very neutral images like a Q tip And we looked at still images of cororn I remember there were like men taking selfies with a mirror and I'm like, give me a romance novel. Like this is not gonna do this for me. But I did that every day. And Laura did this spit stick scan, spit stick, scan again and again for a month The hardest part was halfway through whereere you're like, I've done fifteen days of this Oh my God, there's fifteen more. And with every scan, they were taking a picture of what her brain looked like on each day of her cycle. And then with every task, they were looking at how her brain worked, literally how it was firing as she moved through that cycle Exactly. Did you like look at your data every day? O did you wait til the end to look at your data? Yeah, great question. I waited till the end So we actually decided to start blind in the middle of a cycle so that I would eliminate as much bias as possible. And I also didn't even know where I was at in my cycle. And I remember I didn't even know when I was going to get my period, but I remember a graduate student had to come in Give me like a tamp on. When it was all said and done, Laura and her team had all of these images of her brain. And then alongside that, they had what her hormones were doing at the time the images were taken And when they put those two things together, her data were beautiful. When she started to look at sort of relationships between that period when estrodol peaks right around the time of ovulation She saw this like massive increase in functional connectivity across Most parts of the brain. Wait, what is functional connectivity? Like what am I visualizing when you say that phrase This is really just a measure of brain regions that are talking to one another. L all the bits of the brain are talking to one another in a way that's more congealed. So it's like everything is just like hyper connected. Imagine like, let's say we wrapped the brain in a string of Christmas tree lights. I don't know where this analogy is going but we're gonna try it. Stay committed in. Okay. We're wrapping brain in a string of Christmas tree lights and when estral peaked, it's right around the time of ovulation. It's like all the lights go on like the green lights are like really connected to each other and the red lights are all really connected to each other. It's like they're all like working in sync. And then so to walk you through your menstrual cycle, right? right after ovulation, you get this plummeting of estrogen and progesterone starts to dominate the scene And during that moment, which is about a week before your period You start to see like those lights dim a little bit. And it's not like the brain activity is dimming or like cognitive functions are dimming. It's just like this shift in the basic connectivity structure of the brain It's kind of like the structure of the brain is the same. It's just not as in sync, but also used a really high resolution scan of the HIPA campus. So this is the part of the brain that's really important for learning and memory What we discovered is that This region of the brain, and we can actually look at different subfields of the hippocampus. It's not actually one solid structure. It's got all of these little bits and bobs and that we could see these structures of the hippocampus actually grow and shrink along with the menstrual cycle. I mean, like we're on a rapid time. that one is actually physical That one is physical. It's morphological. It is a change that literally like the brain structure is changing across the cycle. Really? That's a thing people can wrap their head around My takeaway here is that these liquid chemicals in my body are washing my brain and changing it mononthly, weekly, daily. Bye To be sure, you need to essentially squash the endgrrine system And if you squash it, you don't allow those rhythmic endocrine changes to occur anymore Then let's see what happens. So they basically do the entire experiment all over again, but this time, Laura, I went to our student Health center and I said Pcribe me the most common birth control packet you're giving the undergrads She went on a drug that suppressed progesterone levels by ninety seven percent The birth control basically wiped out the hormones in the back half of Laura's cycle, so that progesterone rise. And then she went back to the lab, spit stick scan, and the progesterone dependent changes that we saw in the hippocampus across the cycle were completely obliterated So it did give you the chance to say like, look at the data These bumps we're seeing are because of estrogen and progesterone cycling Exactly, yeah. Okay, so if you're telling me, I can keep telling people that at different points of your cycle, your brain changes. Yes. Wow.. I think where we need to be careful is in the interpretation of that fact. don't know what it means in terms of behavior. So that's where we have to draw the line. It's like I don't know if this is good or bad. it's just different Well, it's funny, It's like I can tell you what that feels like. In my body, it feels like You're making all these connections and you're going so fast and like The world is like a little brighter and I'm quicker. Like I'm like, send send give me an improv troop. Like I y snd the shit out of this show. You know what I'm saying And then when the when what you're saying that the progesteron takes over and estrogen decreases and when I'm like right before I'm bleeding, I'm like Give me a second Oh like yeah, like what was your name Oh, yeah. There were tears. I remember that was a note. I was crying in the parking lot for some reason As part of the study, Laura was tracking her mood each day. Like I was seeing the negative affect rise. progesterone rising. So I was seeing it across multiple days. and I was like, wow This is real and maybe for me and maybe not for the female across from me. Laura and Emily did say they can't peg any particular person's mood or cognition to these hormone changes. I mean, the body is freaking complicated, like estrogen affects dopamine For me, that might feel really good to get that extra hit of dopamine. But if you're a person who already has a lot of dopamine, it could make you feel awful. So like I think we still need the data to like understand how that is tied to those aspects of cognition If you're like a Molly brain, when you first hear this research, you're like, oh, wow, it's so cool. like every day that I have had my cycle since doing this story. I'm like, what's my brain doing today? But it also feels like, oh my God, this is the exact thing that people have been saying for millennia. Women are hormonal. women change, unlike men womomen aren't reliable when you like callall somebody hormonal It's like almost always directed at a woman, right? Like it's ajorative. But like that belves the fact that hormones are in all of us. These are ancient molecules. Every vertebrates have them. these are essential And, you know, men have them too But it sort of comes right from the fact of like Rs. Females you know, are changing onn this twenty eight day cycle, it's like I'm not saying like men don't have hormones, but I think is a cycle that women are running through. Right. I'm not sure if you're about to tell me like, well, guess what? Men are going through a cycle two. Yeah, guess what? Men are going through a cycle two. Wait, really? Yes That's right, We're not getting out of this episode without The trending thing is boy Kibble, right A man We're going inside the mail cycle after the break. Radioab is supported by Capital One. With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder that Capital One bank guy is so passionate about banking with Capital One If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums, he'd also talk about how Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs. Yep even on weekends prettytty much all he talks about. In a good way, h's in your wallet Terms apply, see capital onene dot com slash banki, Cital onene and a member FDIC WNYC Studios is supported by Poster House, a boutique museum in the heart of Chelsea, now presenting A Black, posters from Black American Stage and Screen, an exhibition centered on prominent theatrical performances and films from Jim Crow America. These historical advertisements illustrate a hidden era of black cultural development, when performers started to reclaim harmful narratives and demands for all black casts signaled a trend toward more diverse mainstream audiences On view until september sixth, learearn more at posterhouse. org slash studios Hey, it's Michael Ooinger from onn the Media. It's been a minute since our FEMA series came out and I want our New York listeners to know that we're having an in person event in a couple of weeks. I'll be joined by former FEMA official Marianne Tierney We'll talk about the history of the agency and how it's being reshaped now under the Trump administration Join us in person at WNYC seven PM on june twenty fourth. G tickets at wnYC dot org slash events One of the reasons we did twenty and he. just Is that what it was called? twenty eight and he? Yeah. Oh, that's hilarious fun fact, this was actually Laura's then partner now husband. I met Laura first, an intramural softball in graduate school. His name is Pavel. Pavel Shaperena. I am a scientist. Shout out to Pavel The summer that we met, she had done prior that summer this study on herself and I was just taken aback that someone would do that for science or just stick themselves in a huge magnet for a whole month every day. I mean, immediately I was kind of like Wow, I'm in love. You know, I've climbed the I B tower So when Laura said, hey So how do you feel about climbing into the MRI Pavvel said yes. She would always be there by my side Every morning they'd get in the car. I'd be pooling my saliva. like collecting it in your mouth. Yeah. Like don't talk. just Gather spit. That's right. Yeah. He'd walk into the lab, deposit his spit, and Mario would come and take some blood I just love this character of Mario the phlebotomus Then, just like Laura, he would lie in the scanner still as can be For his experiment, he did double duty. The first fifteen days we had a morning scan and a morning blood draw. And then ten days into that thir day period, we also started a fifteen day nightly Scanning Why were you getting scanned twice a day? Whereas, you know, the main fluctuation of estrogen happens on a monthly time scale u testosterone has sort of a daily rhythm, so it's diurnal. It's super high in the morning. know that. Okay. Super high in the morning. And then it drops by anywhere from thirty to seventy percent. night So for Cvel, we really kind of capitalized on this known circadian rhythm where testosterone and progesterone and estrogen are peeaking in the morning, they're dipping in the evening. and we said, huh? like let m have progesterone . Yeah, they have all the bits in, you know that we do at just at different concentrations And these, you know, these hormones cycle in men. And so we wanted to understand that. L is the male brain undergoing kind of a similar degree of change After all Pavel's data was collected Emily and Laura had their team comb through it And they saw. The punchline is that essentially, we see the exact same thing that we saw in Laura, that like when these hormones are peaking, you see the brain become like more interconnected with each other. And then when the hormones dip in the evening, the brain becomes less interconnected And we see, you know, the brain is pulsing on this twenty four hour scale. So when hormones are high, it's a little bit bigger at evening, it sort of like tightens up a little bit. And we get the crazy part is that we can literally see this. curiosity, this wave, if you will, happening every single day throughout the entire heated forty sessions across thirty days. So it's just this like beautiful rhythm that exists and we can I can measure that So it's like these hormones are having the same size effect, whether it's happening On a twenty four hour time scale or across the twenty eight menstrual cycle But wouldn't women also be doing this Circadian Yes, that is true. So we're getting circadian twenty four and twenty eight across time. That's right. and men are more locked into the twenty four. Thats right. That's right Field Contradictory then, because someomehow in you trying to be like, look at men are part of this equation too. It actually just leaves me feeling like Wow, my hormones are even more up and down. And I thought Yeahah Meaning that mean I'm surprised that you have a circadian cycle on top of. Yeah. ye. Like you're absolutely right in that this myth of female variability and this idea that we have this kind of like pet. Emily said that even though females have these two cycles, studies have shown that they're not inherently more variable than males It might be the opposite. Here's where stuff gets, I think ny, it's like Women have this menstrual cycle and for most women, for most of our lives, it's as steady as the tides, right? Like you know, maybe until we start to get to menopause or if there's like a reproductive condition, shhort of that, like it's it is, you know, this sort of rhythmic event. again, it's it's this kind of predictable thing. That is not so true for male dominated hormones like testosterone, which are famously capricious. So testosterone can like spike and dip and it's like super responsive to social stimulus. So you can study this in, you know in animals who get in a fight and you get these like testosterone surges and then if they're They lose a fight, you get like testosterone suppression. It's true in humans who aren't even engaged in like You know, fist to fist combat. if they're just watching TV and their favorite team loses, you can see testosterone suppression. So but that's not happening with like estrogen. Yeah, not as much. It's really, you know, again, every, you know, every sex has every hormone, it' just the proportions that are different. but in, you know, testosterone, which is like on average higher in men,s it's Much more fickle. Wow So it's just funny to me that women are the ones deemed as this like unknowable, you know Turns out All of our brains are oscillating with these hormones Whether it's monthly or daily or fickle or regular, All of us have estrogen and testosterone flowing in And the brain gets bigger and more connected Then estrogen and testosterone flow out and the brain gets smaller and less connected Brains are built to change, they're built to learn, they're built to adapt And here we have this mechanism hormonalally mediated mechanism that's allowing our brains to do that If braines did not change That would be the pathology of interest But wait can I just ask a question My takeaway is that the brain is opening in some way when it's bigger or when it's firing in that stronger Christmas tree light like analogy you gave. L when it's when it's speaking to itself better that it's opening. Yeah. so like it. ese estrogen rhythms are opening up these windows of of enhanced neuroplasticity. and it's Neuroplasticity, you probably know this is this idea that the brain is malleable. It's open to change. And Emily said all sex hormones, including estrogen can go into the brain, down to the level of the DNA and open it up So DNA is organized in this chromatin structure, right? So it's actually like pretty tight and closed up. like wound tight like everyone tightly w the helix and then the helix is like exactly tight It's really tight, right? But there are estrogen, is one of the factors that can actually like loosen up the DNA. It's like it just relaxes a little bit and it can promote the production of proteins. and then that's the pathway by which learning and all of these great things happen. Okay. But this paper that I just sent you was like I got it like five minutes for the interview, so I have no idea what it says. I know. Okay So this is work from Telly Baram and oh my God, it's blowing my mind because This is what the study asks. What happens if during that brief fleeting window where estrogen is flooding the system, your chromatin is all loosened up. It's like it's getting ready for its massage. It's on the table, it's warm. It's like let's go And then you introduce severe stressor You know blasting loud music, you know, you're sort of shaking the animal. You you know introducing it to odors of its predator That happens during this period You create a PTSD like phenotype in these animals. Wow. And it is long lasting This study, which was done in both female and male mice, was an attempt to understand why some people record more trauma than others. And one of the takeaways was High estrogen plus stress can produce PTSD. thenen they ask the question, okay, well what happens in moments of low estrogen? What she is suggesting in her data is that actually if you look at the low estrogen periods of the female menstrual cycle that They were immune to these stressors, likeike they had almost like this armor odd this work is suggesting, which is so profound is that actually there may be sort of these protective mechanisms of Having these beautiful but fleeting windows where you can drive plasticity, but then estrogen levels get a little bit lower and you are more resilient to these stressors Again, pure speculation at this point. Y the science is so young I think for me, the thing with this study is that when I think about my period, the moments of high estrogen are the ones that I feel really good in and the moments of low estrogen are the moments I want to get out of as fast as possible maybe at a deper biological level thoseose moments when we feel our worst. So for me during my period, maybe for you at the end of the day Those might be moments that are worth sitting in If you have really high connectivity between regions of your brain That's really energy dependent. That's Laura again. You could be exhausted It is funny. maybe part of what is opening up for me is like there's so much about, you know, I just finished my period. There's like so much about it where you're like. But so but I'm like just thinking about it in a different way, like as it's almost it's like a way my body is like taking care of itself Yeah I think that's a beautiful way of thinking about it. And I think You know, if I teach a class or guest lecture, I say, what comes to mind when I say estrogen? and it's like Zoe D Chanel's character, new girl crying and, you know and eating ice cream. And it's like, we can move from those stereotypes and be like, wow, hormones are just fucking powerful. And they serve a purpose and they're neuroprotective And if anything, you, why are we trained to think of the cycle as a source of noise when in fact, I think it's a source of stability. You know, hormones guide behavior and they do so through this rhythmic action, whether it's across the circadian cycle for males and females, or whether it's across something like the menstrual cycle for females Geez, are you ever like damn, our brains? twentyw four hours a day it's going up and down, up and down, then every other day it's going up and down, up and down It's like an organizing principleal of the brain It's like it's creaty It's tiring, but you're saying it's not. No Like is it tiring for the waves to like you know happen on this rhythm? I don't know, or is it like organizing the system in some really helpful way Um, I don't know. those are the questions that I want to dig into that like, man, we have just like scratched the surface on scientifically. So what make just the fact that you could even suggest something like, is it organizing us in a certain way I'm like, ooh, why did you choose the verb organizing whyy would brain changes be organizational Brain likes prediction, it likes rhythm, it likes Um You know, lies rhythm. You know, like it's it's like providing a scaffolding or a structure. It's the same thing, like if you have kids and you let them just like You know, there's no rules in the house and they can put themselves to bed whenever they want or they can eat whatever they want like it is. chaos in the house and nobody's happy and nobody functions well, but like you put a little bit of structure, you put a little like organizational structure and then all of a sudden like shit flows better. And maybe that's what hormones are doing. It's like laying down these like fundamental rules, these organizing principles for the brain that can like function at its Most. you know, at its highest level. I don't know. I'm totally speculating here, but yeah yeah. now we get to at least ask the question of like, is that ulse doing anything that the brain likes or that like helps us in some way. Yeah. Wow. that's a cool word pulse. brain pulse like it's working out up there. Yeah, it's like the heartbeat of something, right? It's like the vital sign. It's like you think of like the chunk ch chunk chunk of like the heartbeat monitor, like maybe this is the endocrine system. It's like pulsing on these different rhythms And then it's creating these goes throughout the rest of the body that's like, oh, cool, like here's the rhythm we get to dance to. And that's what I mean when I And thinking about this sort of organizational framework, it's like, I think it's creating that rhythm for then the whole body to get in sync to I think I'm having this question of Brain is such a regal and like commanding object, right? You kind of know how much work it's doing in your body. evenven though it's part of you, it kind of feels like other Like there's there's a way in which it just has a it's all powerful. And so then when I hear something about the brain changes I'm like immediately like, wow Like awestruck? Yeah, oh my God. I think that that idea that the brain is like this regal thing It's a myth I actually think it's an organ like every other part of our body. L I think The way we can show that hormones influence aspects of the brain suggests that I don't know, we're all just kind of these like you know, big Bckets of chemicals walking around and we think we have control, but like no we don't. L I yelled at that person because I'm hgry and I don't even know if I buy into free will if I'm being totally honest. I don't know. I mean, I think that there's ways we can gain free will. But like by and large, we are also just like big biological sacks of stuff and Iay find that I'm a big biological sack, but if I know that, if I say it out loud then I could maybe do a little bit more with the sack, like I could push it to the left and push it to the right, even if only an inch That' that's my hope. That's my wish. I do think an understanding of the system allows us to control it. In fact, I was just on a call earlier this week talking to there's this incredible researcher out of Caltech and he's developing continuous hormone monitors. So you know, we have the glucose monitor where we can track Yes, and now they're starting to develop technology where either from sweat, which seems difficult, but even in like interstitial fluid, you can create a glucose like monitor that can just give us this kind of constant readout hormones I mean, imagine if we could get like a second by second or even just hour by hour readout. We can just watch and observe and see the patterns play out. But that's so huge. I mean, think about the images of Pluto that we had one hundred years ago where it's this like grainy little blood, you know in the sky and now we can see the individual like