Could Taking Birth Control Pills Make Women's Memory More Like Men's?

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A new study shows that taking birth control pills can affect women's memory.

Shawn Nielsen, a graduate student in neurobiology and behavior at the University of California, Irvine, conducted a study with 66 female students, half of whom were taking oral contraception and half who were not.

The participants were given a unique memory test. Some women were randomly assigned to view an emotionally charged video about a young boy who was hit by a car while walking with his mother and then rushed to the hospital, where doctors reattach his severed feet. Other women watched a more neutral narrative in which the mother and son observe a minor accident and then go to the hospital to practice a disaster drill.

Nielsen, who is working toward her doctorate in the lab of Larry Cahill, a well-known hormone researcher, was interested in teasing apart how differences in estrogen and progesterone levels may affect memory. Previous research has hinted that estrogen may enhance verbal memory; in one study, for example, women taking oral contraception showed better recall of words on the active hormone days of their pill cycle than on days when they either weren't supposed to take active pills or took non-hormonal substitutes.

In the current study, when women who viewed the emotional video were tested a week later about what they saw, those who were taking the pill were able to recall the general thread of the story better than its specific details. This is similar to how men remember emotional events, says Nielsen.

"If we reduce women's sex hormone levels, the change in the type of information they recall is more like what a male participant might remember," she says. The pill works by flattening out natural spikes in estrogen and progesterone — which is what triggers ovulation — and signals the body not to make additional hormones, keeping levels low throughout the cycle.

The results were the exact opposite for the women who weren't on the pill: they were better at remembering details, such as what color shirt the boy had on, whether the mother wore glasses, or whether there was a fire hydrant at the intersection. The naturally cycling women couldn't recall the general narrative of the story as well as they could these details.

This doesn't mean that the pill squelches memory or that it robs women of their ability to recall salient things. It's just a matter of what type of information they remember. Since the pill keeps hormone levels steady throughout the cycle, women who take it tend to react differently to emotionally charged experiences, compared with women undergoing the natural monthly ebb and flow of hormones. And that's important since many of the mental illnesses that affect women — such as depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder — are extremely emotional in nature.

"What is important about these findings is that sex hormones affect the type of information recalled from an emotional event," says Nielsen. "What that says to us is that these changes are a powerful tool for future studies investigating the underlying neurobiology of these disorders.

"Simply taking the pill and suppressing natural sex hormone levels can affect what type of information you remember from an emotional event. That speaks to the role that estrogen and progesterone play in memory — they affect how a woman remembers an emotional event in her life," says Nielsen.

A better understanding of this connection could lead to more effective therapies that may target such hormonal drivers. Nielsen is already trying to figure out exactly what levels of hormones are associated with changes in recall. She is about to launch additional studies to correlate fluctuating levels of estrogen and progesterone in naturally cycling women with changes in the type of information they recall from emotional events.

The current study was published in the journal Neurobiology of Learning and Memory.

Alice Park is a writer at TIME. Find her on Twitter at @aliceparkny. You can also continue the discussion on TIME's Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIME.

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Study: Women's Memory More Receptive To Low Voice

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Melissa Block and Lynn Neary learn from researcher Kevin Allan of the University of Aberdeen King's College in Scotland that women remember better when spoken to in a low-pitch voice. This helps women to pick a suitable partner.

Copyright © 2011 National Public Radio®. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

MELISSA BLOCK, host: If you are female, a new study declares that you are more likely to remember something said by this voice...

BARRY WHITE: Take it off. Baby, take it all off.

BLOCK: ...and this one.

UNIDENTIFIED OPERA SINGER: (Singing) (unintelligible).

LYNN NEARY, host: And especially this one...

ROBERT SIEGEL, host: This is NPR.

NEARY: ...than by this one.

UNIDENTIFIED SINGER: (Singing) I don't want my heart to show.

BLOCK: That's because the first three male voices were low-pitched. A team of researchers at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland has determined that females better remember what deep-voiced men say than things said by a man with a higher pitch.

KEVIN ALLAN: And the point to the research was to show that women's memory is sensitive to details associated with men who are desirable.

BLOCK: That's Dr. Kevin Allan. His department conducted the study. He says science already knew that the ladies preferred deep-voiced guys.

NEARY: But the Aberdeen study, for the first time, connected voice pitch with memory. The study was done by showing a group of women various objects while hearing men say the name of the object. The deeper the voice of the man, the more likely the women would recall it.

BLOCK: Now, they did test men, too, but Lynn, apparently male memories are not sensitive to the pitch of a female voice.

NEARY: Well, that's good to know.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "TIPTOE THROUGH THE TULIPS")

TINY TIM: (Singing) Tiptoe from the garden, by the garden of a willow tree and tiptoe through the tulips with me.

Copyright © 2011 National Public Radio®. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to National Public Radio. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.

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When memory is scattered

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Phil Kreitner, 71, lives in Portland, Oregon, and is experiencing lapses in memory.Mild cognitive impairment means some memory problems, but no language or general thinking difficultiesThe Alzheimer's Association's TrialMatch website aims to help people find appropriate clinical trialsIt's challenging to get people to volunteer for dementia clinical trials, especially with mild symptoms

Portland, Oregon (CNN) -- There was cake at one of the last birthdays Robert John Kreitner Jr. would have at the nursing home in Pennsylvania, but the guest of honor didn't open his eyes to see it.

His wife propped him up at the end of the table. Their son Phil couldn't help thinking the scene macabre.

Phil Kreitner's father, a self-taught engineer, was firm-minded and hated to concede a point. Only once in the last 12 years of his life had Robert Kreitner admitted he had trouble remembering things. Now that his son is having memory problems of his own, he vows he'll never end up in a nursing home like his father, but won't deny what's happening to his brain.

"It's helpful to me that my father had Alzheimer's, because it makes it much easier for me to accept the existence of it, the reality of it, and the personalization of it, and the finality of it," says Kreitner, 71, of Portland, Oregon.

Kreitner has mild cognitive impairment, an early stage of dementia that researchers consider a prime window of opportunity to try potential treatments to stop the progression of memory loss and cognitive decline. A person with mild cognitive impairment has a measurable memory problem, but no language or general thinking difficulties and is still able to function, says Dr. Joseph Quinn, researcher at Oregon Health & Sciences University and Portland VA Medical Center.

Not everyone who has mild cognitive impairment will worsen and develop Alzheimer's disease, but there are certain signatures in the brain -- plaques formed from a protein called beta-amyloid -- that indicate a high likelihood of Alzheimer's in patients who are already having memory problems. The plaques can be identified through MRI and PET scans.

"My memory is a jigsaw puzzle and it's just been dumped out of the box," Kreitner says. "If I were to have to reconstruct that puzzle, I couldn't do it."

Insulin may help treat Alzheimer's disease

Kreitner believes it's his duty to humankind join the effort to fight Alzheimer's, the disease that ultimately took his father's life. The condition affects about 5.4 million people in the United States and is projected to affect 16 million by 2050.

That's why Kreitner is participating in a clinical trial that is investigating a drug in patients with mild cognitive impairment.

"My father was very militaristic, so I've had this stuff beat into my head my whole life: You have a responsibility to the collectivity, however the collectivity is defined. No man is an island," Kreitner says.

Getting patients into trials

Alzheimer's researchers wish they found more people with Kreitner's attitude, but in practice it's hard to get patients into clinical trials for Alzheimer's and dementia.

One problem is that some people want to join a trial only if they know for certain they will be trying an experimental drug. But scientifically valid medical studies are "double-blind," meaning neither the researchers nor the participants know who's getting real medicine or and who's getting a fake treatment called a placebo.

That is the strongest way to demonstrate that taking a drug works better than doing nothing. It also means that some participants will go through the entire trial process without trying the experimental treatment. Even some physicians try to get their patients in the drug treatment groups, but it goes against the standard method of trials for the experimenters to know who is getting what treatment, says William Thies, chief medical and scientific officer at the Alzheimer's Association.

There are also practical issues with elderly patients' participation, such as transportation and coordinating with caregivers. In the early stages of dementia, patients are still able to make decisions about joining trials. For later-stage patients, the caregiver has the burden of finding a study and taking the patient through the process.

It is especially challenging to recruit for mild cognitive impairment trials because people are more reluctant to come forward with mild problems, Quinn says. Also, some people don't want to take on the potential risks of an experimental drug.

The Alzheimer's Association's TrialMatch website, which launched last year, aims to help people find appropriate trials that are convenient to them. The website lists more than 120 trials. So far, almost 12,000 people have completed profiles on the website; the Alzheimer's Association is in the process of helping them find appropriate trials.

"Without trial volunteers, we actually won't have the next new medication. If everybody actually understood how critical their participation might be in making a better future, probably we'd have many more people volunteering for trials," Thies says.

An experimental drug

Kreitner is taking part in a phase II drug trial sponsored by Bristol-Myers Squibb. Quinn is the principal investigator for the portion of the trial at Oregon Health & Sciences University, one of dozens of sites across the country.

The drug in question is a gamma secretase inhibitor, a class of drug that is supposed to interfere with the formation of plaques of beta-amyloid proteins in the brain.

The news around gamma secretase inhibitors hasn't been good so far -- at least in patients with Alzheimer's. Last year, Eli Lilly announced it would halt the development of semagacestat, a gamma secretase inhibitor, because two ongoing long-term phase III studies indicated that it didn't slow the progression of Alzheimer's; researchers found an association with worsening of cognitive symptoms, too.

But Quinn and colleagues are hoping that a drug of the same type will work in patients with mild cognitive impairment, given that their brains have not built up as much pathology.

Documented risks of this drug include increased incidence of relatively benign skin cancer, gastrointestinal problems and brain swelling, he says.

So far, Kreitner says he has felt no side effects. Every two or three months, he gets brain scans and spinal taps so researchers can check for the biomarkers associated with dementia. He doesn't mind the process, not even when they stick a needle into his spinal column.

"It's my personal feeling that I'm making literally no sacrifice except to force myself to remember to take these capsules every day," he says.

Life in the shadow of Alzheimer's

Kreitner has had myriad careers: naval officer, adjunct professor, massage therapist, environmentalist and demographer, among other things. He's also a master at the rowing machine and logs 90 minutes a week. He snagged second place at the World Indoor Rowing Championship in Boston in his age group this year.

You can tell he has done a lot of thinking about society's failings, and admits he has always felt a general dissatisfaction with the world and himself. He's always been someone who self-assesses, striving to stay in good shape; these days, that includes monitoring his own mental functioning.

His wife, Sherril Gelmon, professor of public health at Portland State University, noticed Kreitner's forgetfulness about two years ago. Kreitner himself became aware of small lapses; he would find himself in a room and forget his purpose for being there, for example. The two began to get edgier with each other, which is uncommon in their 13 years of marriage.

She went with Kreitner to the Layton Aging and Alzheimer's Disease Center at Oregon Health & Sciences University. The couple wanted to know if Kreitner would be eligible for any treatments, and learned about the Bristol-Myers Squibb trial. Quinn told them Kreitner could be eligible, and after an official screening, Kreitner joined the study.

After Gelmon recounts this history, Kreitner smiles and says that he wouldn't have been able to give all those details himself.

"I'm at the stage where everything that Sherril just said rings a bell," he says. "If you were to ask me, 'What's happened in the past couple of years relating to this?' I couldn't have given you 10% of that."

Members of both sides of Gelmon's family have had dementia. Her father died in 2009 and her mother is in the advanced stages, so she's also familiar with the realities of the condition. She monitors her own mental state, but doesn't wake up afraid of it. She and Kreitner talk regularly about how they might need to adjust their lifestyle, if at all, if Phil's condition were to worsen.

"It's hard when you're not as good at what you're doing as you used to be. I wouldn't say we're depressed; I would say frustrated, upset. Since both of us have watched parents go through it, we've already done a certain level of coping," Gelmon says.

Toward the end

Before his death, Kreitner's current goal is to write a book -- and if he can't get there, a 1,500-word article -- about how he views the world. He says it's an "an adjuration to my fellow humans to start thinking like a species; my hypothesis is that we're on an individual, class, ethnic, national, racial self-destruction trip, and we're taking the planet down in the struggle."

Remembering how his mother suffered trying to take care of his father at home, and visiting him in the nursing home, Kreitner doesn't want to burden Gelmon in the same way, nor does he see himself in a nursing home.

But if he gets to a point that he deems too far along, he's resolved, even though it is not legal, to find a way to "check out" of life.

"I will give proper notice. It will not be specific but it will be implicit that I feel that the time is now or never. I will bear complete responsibility for any actions that result in my death. I will not make a mess," he says.

Gelmon shows no anguish when her husband speaks this way; she is calm and matter-of-fact when she says: "My expectation is that if and when we get to that point, we will have discussed it at length and it will not be a surprise. It will still make me very sad, but if we're communicating well and early, then it should not come as a surprise and it should be something I'm as informed about as he's willing to inform me."

In the meantime, Kreitner continues to follow the regimen of gray capsules prescribed by the clinical trial. He relies on notes, a lot of them, to remember to keep appointments, and often waits for memories to make their way up through the mud in his mind.

"We've got way more human beings on this planet than it could sustain, even if we were sane. Who the hell am I? When my effectiveness is gone, I'm gone," he says. "Lead, follow, or get out of the way."

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HEALTH MANAGEMENT. When memory is scattered

Phil Kreitner, 71, lives in Portland, Oregon, and is experiencing lapses in memory.Mild cognitive impairment means some memory problems, but no language or general thinking difficultiesThe Alzheimer's Association's TrialMatch website aims to help people find appropriate clinical trialsIt's challenging to get people to volunteer for dementia clinical trials, especially with mild symptoms
Portland, Oregon (CNN) -- There was cake at one of the last birthdays Robert John Kreitner Jr. would have at the nursing home in Pennsylvania, but the guest of honor didn't open his eyes to see it.
His wife propped him up at the end of the table. Their son Phil couldn't help thinking the scene macabre.
Phil Kreitner's father, a self-taught engineer, was firm-minded and hated to concede a point. Only once in the last 12 years of his life had Robert Kreitner admitted he had trouble remembering things. Now that his son is having memory problems of his own, he vows he'll never end up in a nursing home like his father, but won't deny what's happening to his brain.
"It's helpful to me that my father had Alzheimer's, because it makes it much easier for me to accept the existence of it, the reality of it, and the personalization of it, and the finality of it," says Kreitner, 71, of Portland, Oregon.
Kreitner has mild cognitive impairment, an early stage of dementia that researchers consider a prime window of opportunity to try potential treatments to stop the progression of memory loss and cognitive decline. A person with mild cognitive impairment has a measurable memory problem, but no language or general thinking difficulties and is still able to function, says Dr. Joseph Quinn, researcher at Oregon Health & Sciences University and Portland VA Medical Center.
Not everyone who has mild cognitive impairment will worsen and develop Alzheimer's disease, but there are certain signatures in the brain -- plaques formed from a protein called beta-amyloid -- that indicate a high likelihood of Alzheimer's in patients who are already having memory problems. The plaques can be identified through MRI and PET scans.
"My memory is a jigsaw puzzle and it's just been dumped out of the box," Kreitner says. "If I were to have to reconstruct that puzzle, I couldn't do it."
Insulin may help treat Alzheimer's disease
Kreitner believes it's his duty to humankind join the effort to fight Alzheimer's, the disease that ultimately took his father's life. The condition affects about 5.4 million people in the United States and is projected to affect 16 million by 2050.
That's why Kreitner is participating in a clinical trial that is investigating a drug in patients with mild cognitive impairment.
"My father was very militaristic, so I've had this stuff beat into my head my whole life: You have a responsibility to the collectivity, however the collectivity is defined. No man is an island," Kreitner says.
Getting patients into trials
Alzheimer's researchers wish they found more people with Kreitner's attitude, but in practice it's hard to get patients into clinical trials for Alzheimer's and dementia.
One problem is that some people want to join a trial only if they know for certain they will be trying an experimental drug. But scientifically valid medical studies are "double-blind," meaning neither the researchers nor the participants know who's getting real medicine or and who's getting a fake treatment called a placebo.
That is the strongest way to demonstrate that taking a drug works better than doing nothing. It also means that some participants will go through the entire trial process without trying the experimental treatment. Even some physicians try to get their patients in the drug treatment groups, but it goes against the standard method of trials for the experimenters to know who is getting what treatment, says William Thies, chief medical and scientific officer at the Alzheimer's Association.
There are also practical issues with elderly patients' participation, such as transportation and coordinating with caregivers. In the early stages of dementia, patients are still able to make decisions about joining trials. For later-stage patients, the caregiver has the burden of finding a study and taking the patient through the process.
It is especially challenging to recruit for mild cognitive impairment trials because people are more reluctant to come forward with mild problems, Quinn says. Also, some people don't want to take on the potential risks of an experimental drug.
The Alzheimer's Association's TrialMatch website, which launched last year, aims to help people find appropriate trials that are convenient to them. The website lists more than 120 trials. So far, almost 12,000 people have completed profiles on the website; the Alzheimer's Association is in the process of helping them find appropriate trials.
"Without trial volunteers, we actually won't have the next new medication. If everybody actually understood how critical their participation might be in making a better future, probably we'd have many more people volunteering for trials," Thies says.
An experimental drug
Kreitner is taking part in a phase II drug trial sponsored by Bristol-Myers Squibb. Quinn is the principal investigator for the portion of the trial at Oregon Health & Sciences University, one of dozens of sites across the country.
The drug in question is a gamma secretase inhibitor, a class of drug that is supposed to interfere with the formation of plaques of beta-amyloid proteins in the brain.
The news around gamma secretase inhibitors hasn't been good so far -- at least in patients with Alzheimer's. Last year, Eli Lilly announced it would halt the development of semagacestat, a gamma secretase inhibitor, because two ongoing long-term phase III studies indicated that it didn't slow the progression of Alzheimer's; researchers found an association with worsening of cognitive symptoms, too.
But Quinn and colleagues are hoping that a drug of the same type will work in patients with mild cognitive impairment, given that their brains have not built up as much pathology.
Documented risks of this drug include increased incidence of relatively benign skin cancer, gastrointestinal problems and brain swelling, he says.
So far, Kreitner says he has felt no side effects. Every two or three months, he gets brain scans and spinal taps so researchers can check for the biomarkers associated with dementia. He doesn't mind the process, not even when they stick a needle into his spinal column.
"It's my personal feeling that I'm making literally no sacrifice except to force myself to remember to take these capsules every day," he says.
Life in the shadow of Alzheimer's
Kreitner has had myriad careers: naval officer, adjunct professor, massage therapist, environmentalist and demographer, among other things. He's also a master at the rowing machine and logs 90 minutes a week. He snagged second place at the World Indoor Rowing Championship in Boston in his age group this year.
You can tell he has done a lot of thinking about society's failings, and admits he has always felt a general dissatisfaction with the world and himself. He's always been someone who self-assesses, striving to stay in good shape; these days, that includes monitoring his own mental functioning.
His wife, Sherril Gelmon, professor of public health at Portland State University, noticed Kreitner's forgetfulness about two years ago. Kreitner himself became aware of small lapses; he would find himself in a room and forget his purpose for being there, for example. The two began to get edgier with each other, which is uncommon in their 13 years of marriage.
She went with Kreitner to the Layton Aging and Alzheimer's Disease Center at Oregon Health & Sciences University. The couple wanted to know if Kreitner would be eligible for any treatments, and learned about the Bristol-Myers Squibb trial. Quinn told them Kreitner could be eligible, and after an official screening, Kreitner joined the study.
After Gelmon recounts this history, Kreitner smiles and says that he wouldn't have been able to give all those details himself.
"I'm at the stage where everything that Sherril just said rings a bell," he says. "If you were to ask me, 'What's happened in the past couple of years relating to this?' I couldn't have given you 10% of that."
Members of both sides of Gelmon's family have had dementia. Her father died in 2009 and her mother is in the advanced stages, so she's also familiar with the realities of the condition. She monitors her own mental state, but doesn't wake up afraid of it. She and Kreitner talk regularly about how they might need to adjust their lifestyle, if at all, if Phil's condition were to worsen.
"It's hard when you're not as good at what you're doing as you used to be. I wouldn't say we're depressed; I would say frustrated, upset. Since both of us have watched parents go through it, we've already done a certain level of coping," Gelmon says.
Toward the end
Before his death, Kreitner's current goal is to write a book -- and if he can't get there, a 1,500-word article -- about how he views the world. He says it's an "an adjuration to my fellow humans to start thinking like a species; my hypothesis is that we're on an individual, class, ethnic, national, racial self-destruction trip, and we're taking the planet down in the struggle."
Remembering how his mother suffered trying to take care of his father at home, and visiting him in the nursing home, Kreitner doesn't want to burden Gelmon in the same way, nor does he see himself in a nursing home.
But if he gets to a point that he deems too far along, he's resolved, even though it is not legal, to find a way to "check out" of life.
"I will give proper notice. It will not be specific but it will be implicit that I feel that the time is now or never. I will bear complete responsibility for any actions that result in my death. I will not make a mess," he says.
Gelmon shows no anguish when her husband speaks this way; she is calm and matter-of-fact when she says: "My expectation is that if and when we get to that point, we will have discussed it at length and it will not be a surprise. It will still make me very sad, but if we're communicating well and early, then it should not come as a surprise and it should be something I'm as informed about as he's willing to inform me."
In the meantime, Kreitner continues to follow the regimen of gray capsules prescribed by the clinical trial. He relies on notes, a lot of them, to remember to keep appointments, and often waits for memories to make their way up through the mud in his mind.
"We've got way more human beings on this planet than it could sustain, even if we were sane. Who the hell am I? When my effectiveness is gone, I'm gone," he says. "Lead, follow, or get out of the way."

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