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Pre-Menstrual Syndrome, PMS, is that time of the month when women's moods can go up and down like a rollercoaster. But not all women experience symptoms. As this ScienCentral News video explains, a brain imaging study may begin to explain why.
It's All in the Brain
Everyone is familiar with the stereotype of the woman temporarily turned insane by her menstrual cycle. One minute she's sobbing uncontrollably over a commercial for baby food, the next she's screaming in fury at her ten-year-old for spilling milk on the kitchen counter. Meanwhile, her husband tries to stay out of the way by watching television in the living room, sighing under his breath, "just a few more days… ."
Although this picture is a dramatic exaggeration often played up in pop culture, PMS is a real disorder that neuroscientist David Silbersweig at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University estimates affects 75 percent of women, albeit with varying degrees of intensity. For the most part, women experience mild variations of what Kimberly Echeverria of Brooklyn, NY describes, "I get emotional. I'll get mad, I'll get sad, I just get emotional," she says. But for others, the problems can be more serious. Pam Purewall from London, England says, "I get very frazzled, my mind goes all wooshy, I can't concentrate. That's the time when I have the most car accidents." The other 25 percent of women, though, somehow manage to avoid the notorious monthly mood swings entirely.
How some women can be so affected by PMS, while others stay level-headed, remains a mystery. But as reported on Discover.com, Silbersweig may be on the road to an answer. His research team set up MRI brain scanners to take a look at what happened in the brains of 12 women who are part of the lucky minority that doesn't get PMS. "We wanted to understand what goes on in the brain across the menstrual cycle in women who don't have fluctuation and then be able, in the future, to compare that with women who do experience the fluctuations," he explains.
The research team scanned the women's brains just before and then just after they had their periods. Each time, they asked the women to perform word tests designed to measure how they deal with their emotions and control their behaviors. The team picked 240 words that fell into one of three emotional categories: positive, negative, or neutral (negative: rape, death, cancer; neutral: bookcase, rotate, clarinet; positive: safe, gentle, delighted). While the women were in the MRI scanner, they could see the words one after another as they came up on a screen, written either in italics or normal font. The women's job was to press a button only if the word was in a normal font, but not if it was italicized. The tricky part of the activity was to stop their button-pressing momentum when an italicized word suddenly came up, regardless of whether it was a negative, positive, or neutral one. "You can almost think of it as a brain stress test, if you will, the same way as when a person goes to a cardiologist, you put them on a treadmill and hook up their heart to an electrocardiogram to see the functioning of the heart in its various parts," Silbersweig says. While the volunteers completed this task, the researchers recorded the activity in their brains.
When Silbersweig and his team analyzed all the pictures, they saw that a frontal part of the brain known to control emotions and behavior called the orbitofrontal cortex lit up while the women completed the task before they had their periods, but not when they did it again after their periods had passed. So even though none of these women had any conscious experience of PMS symptoms, these results suggest that on an unconscious level their brain was working especially hard just before their period to keep their inner emotional lives in control. As Silbersweig says, "That may suggest that this region is important in keeping a steady keel, so to speak, at that time of the month."
Silbersweig hopes that future studies will help his team crack the secrets of how this brain region works, so that one day more women may be PMS-free. He reminds us, "It's important to realize that for many women it's not much trouble and there's no treatment needed, but for women who suffer with the severe form called pre-menstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD), localizing the brain regions can be important, not just in de-stigmatizing and helping people to understand what this is about, but helping to design and tailor treatments." He is currently completing a second study that examines the brains of women with this kind of severe PMS.
If Silbersweig succeeds, everyone should benefit, although men will have to come up with new, more creative ways to explain away women's nonsensical behavior than just blaming it on "that time of the month."
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