Scientist scans her own brain 75 times to study the effects of birth control pills

Carina Heller has found a creative way to donate her brain to science while still using it.

The University of Minnesota neuroscientist wanted to better understand how birth control pills affect the brain, so she spent 75 sessions in an MRI machine to find out.

“It wasn’t really that hard, to be honest, because I knew what I was doing it for and I was really excited that we could do the research,” Heller said. As it happens host Nil Köksal.

Heller is working to make her brain data available to other scientists, hoping to add to what she sees as a lack of research on women’s brains in general, and on the neurological impact of oral contraceptives in particular.

“Although this drug already exists [decades]this field of research is still very small,” she said.

Why women’s bodies are so little studied

Since hormonal birth control pills came onto the market in the 1960s, they have generally proven to be both safe and effective. But even after all this time, Heller says, there are still uncertainties.

“We know that some women develop symptoms of depression and anxiety when using oral contraceptives, and that some women thrive when using these types of medications,” she said. “And I was just curious why.”

But when she started examining the existing research, she found only a few hundred studies that mentioned keywords like “oral contraceptives and mental health” or “oral contraceptives and MRI.”

She says this is “a very small number” considering how long these drugs have been widely used.

It’s a problem, she says, that goes far beyond her own research interests.

“Females and females have always been considered the smaller version of a male body, so the male body has always been the norm when it comes to biomedical research,” she said.

“Just because the study is so small and so little has been published, it’s just easier for us to be the participants in getting the research done.”

Dr. Annie Duchesne, professor of psychology and gender studies at the University of British Columbia, calls this an “androcentric bias” – when information about male bodies becomes the “norm” and is used to draw broader conclusions about people of all sexes and genders. .

When that happens, she says, “we have an implicit erasure of the needs and questions about other bodies.”

She says she welcomes Heller’s contribution, but also warned that researchers must be careful not to create new biases and new norms as they try to correct decades of a male-centric approach. She believes science is best when it includes people from different backgrounds, locations, gender identities and genders.

“Therefore, the conclusions drawn from it may actually have sustainability,” she said.

Gilmore girls And Emily in Paris

During Heller’s research, she woke up early every morning and got into an MRI machine at 7:30 am.

Her colleagues scanned her 25 times over three five-week periods: before she started taking birth control, after three months of taking it, and after three months of stopping it.

In the machine, her only job was to remain as still and calm as possible while trying not to fall asleep. So she binged TV.

‘I knew I liked it Gilmore girls. I’ve watched it a million times. So I knew I wouldn’t get too excited watching it,” she said.

She looked too Emily in Paris. “I didn’t watch last season because it was so boring, so that wouldn’t have helped keep me awake,” she said, laughing.

Studying the pros and cons of yourself

There is a rich history, Duchesne says, of scientists experimenting on themselves, especially in the field of neurology. She says the data that comes from that kind of work can be incredibly rich in some ways, but limited in others.

In Heller’s case, Duchesne says it’s especially helpful to see brain scans before, during, and after birth control pill use, which cover the entire menstrual cycle.

“In terms of quantitative data analysis, 75 scans is a lot of data points,” she said.

But she cautioned against drawing sweeping conclusions from a single subject, even if that subject is also an expert.

“You only have one participant, so the phenomenon is the phenomenon you observe in one person,” she said. “Not only that, but you also have the knowledge, motivation and perspective of the experimenter that cannot be controlled for.”

Heller says she and her colleagues are just starting to look at the data they’ve collected, and haven’t published any findings yet.

Very early analysis, she says, showed that the volume of her brain and the interconnectivity between parts of her brain fluctuated during her menstrual cycle, and both seemed to drop slightly when she took the pill.

But, she warned, it is far too early to draw conclusions about what that means. Instead, she sees it as a starting point that her team and other scientists can build on.

“There are so many possibilities and so many different ways this data can be analyzed,” she said. “If I did this all by myself, it would take 15 to 20 years.”