Effects of Oral Contraceptives on Emotion Regulation

 描述(由申请人提供)：尽管有充分的证据证明了药物成瘾过程中的性别差异，但神经内分泌对这些性别差异的贡献还没有得到充分的探索。在美国，大多数女性至少在其生育期的一段时间内服用口服避孕药，这会显著降低性激素水平。然而，据我们所知，口服避孕药与药物滥用/依赖之间可能涉及或解释先前观察到的性别差异的任何潜在关系从未被正式调查过。我们假设，口服避孕药使用引起的激素变化可能会降低情绪调节任务的表现，该任务激活了以前在口服避孕药使用者中显示的不太活跃的大脑区域。情绪调节方面的缺陷与药物滥用问题有关。因此，我们建议调查口服避孕药是否会减少情绪调节，作为确定它们是否可以影响戒毒努力的第一步。

 DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Although ample evidence has documented sex differences in the course of drug addiction, neuroendocrine contributions to these sex differences have not been fully explored. Oral contraceptive pills are used by the majority of women in the US for at least one period of their reproductive years, and dramatically decrease sex hormone levels. However, any potential relationship between oral contraceptives and drug abuse/dependence that may relate to or explain previously observed sex differences has never been formally investigated to our knowledge. We hypothesize that the change in hormones caused by oral contraceptive use can decrease performance on an emotion regulation task that activates regions of the brain previously shown be less active in oral contraceptive users. Deficits in emotion regulation have been linked to substance abuse problems. Therefore, we propose to investigate whether oral contraceptives decrease emotion regulation as a first step toward determining whether they can influence efforts toward drug abstinence.