An audience of about 130 people came to the Massachusetts Room at the Mullins Center yesterday for a lecture titled “Stress, puberty and mental health: remodeling of the brain’s response to ovarian hormones.”
The lecture, run by Jeffrey D. Blaustein, Director of the Neuroscience and Behavior graduate program at the University of Massachusetts, discussed the sexual behavior of mice as a model for the behavior of pubescent girls.

The lecture, this year’s third distinguished faculty lecture, described the possible effects that stressors during puberty may have on a woman’s adulthood, as seen in mice.

Blaustein has spent almost 40 years of his career studying the sexual behavior of female mice.

“My interest is in how hormones, in particular those that come from the ovaries of females, [impact] the brain … and how other animal stressors influence that,” Blaustein said.

His decision to study puberty came when he and his colleagues noticed that mice were more receptive to hormones before their first reproductive cycle. After conducting an experiment on their immune systems, Blaustein’s team discovered that this sensitivity was caused by stress.

Blaustein evaluated this through studying the sex hormone estradiol, which both mice and women begin secreting during puberty.

Because of this, “it’s not a stretch to consider that rats and mice and guinea pigs are a model for some aspects of sexual response in women,” Blaustein said.

He said that being shipped to a lab is a stressful experience for a mouse, and his studies noticed that shipping during a sensitive pubescent period affected a mouse’s estradiol levels later in life. The hormone proved to be an antidepressant and helped mice perform in situations that tested their cognitive faculties as well as anxious and depressive behaviors.

“There’s a large decrease in the concentration of … cells containing estrogen receptors … in animals that were shipped during puberty,” Blaustein said. “This provides proof of principle that exposing mice to some stressor in puberty has enduring influences on the regulation of neural estrogen receptors.”

Blaustein is interested in examining whether or not this decrease of estradiol occurs in girls who had difficult social experiences during puberty.

“Girls show much more depression than boys do,” he said. “It happens right around the time of puberty, and what it suggests is that the events of puberty, and I would argue most likely the hormonal events of puberty, may set the stage for mental illness later in life.”

Blaustein will continue exploring this through mice, as it is easier to study their cognitive patterns than those of humans, he said.

“We can test [mice] directly to see connections between hormones and stress in a way you can’t on humans,” Blaustein said.

He has seen similar studies exploring female behavior during adolescence, but he thinks puberty is very important to consider.

“[Scientific studies on humans] very seldom look specifically at what’s going on during puberty … and that’s what I’m interested in doing,” he said. “Clearly puberty is doing something very important.”

Blaustein is a three-time graduate of UMass, the president of the Society for Behavioral Neuroendocrinology, and the editor-in-chief of Endocrinology, a research journal. He received the Chancellor’s Medal from Senior Vice Chancellor James V. Staros following the presentation.

Afterwards, there was a small reception with food and beverages in the lobby.

Sarah Fonder can be reached at [email protected].