Brain In Women Research Articles

87 A data warehousing approach to support clinical trials research

There is a substantial interest in identifying interventions that can protect and buffer older adults from atrophy in the cortex and particularly, the hippocampus, a region important to memory. We report the 2-year effects of a randomized controlled trial of an intergenerational social health promotion program on older men's and women's brain volumes.The Brain Health Study simultaneously enrolled, evaluated, and randomized 111 men and women (58 interventions; 53 controls) within the Baltimore Experience Corps Trial to evaluate the intervention impact on biomarkers of brain health at baseline and annual follow-ups during the 2-year trial exposure.Intention-to-treat analyses on cortical and hippocampal volumes for full and sex-stratified samples revealed program-specific increases in volumes that reached significance in men only (P's ≤ .04). Although men in the control arm exhibited age-related declines for 2 years, men in the Experience Corps arm showed a 0.7% to 1.6% increase in brain volumes. Women also exhibited modest intervention-specific gains of 0.3% to 0.54% by the second year of exposure that contrasted with declines of about 1% among women in the control group.These findings showed that purposeful activity embedded within a social health promotion program halted and, in men, reversed declines in brain volume in regions vulnerable to dementia.Clinical Trial Registration: NCT0038.

Corrections to a paper on race and sex differences in brain size and intelligence

This paper presents two corrections to an earlier paper by Rushton ( Personality and Individual Differences, 11, 785–794, 1990). The first is to the equation used to calculate cranial capacities from externally measured head sizes. Eleven millimeters should be subtracted from head length and width for fat and skin around the skull. When the subtractions are made the cranial capacities for the different races are about 200 cm 3 smaller than previously reported, although the significant rank ordering of Mongoloids > Caucasoids > Negroids is preserved. The second correction is to the statement that there are no sex differences in brain size when body size variables are controlled. Two recent studies using large data sets show that after covariance adjustment for body size, women's brains average 100 g lighter and 110 cm 3 smaller than men's. These findings are best understood from the perspective of human evolution.

One Woman's Brain Braindance: New Discoveries about Human Origins and Evolution Dean Falk

One Woman's Brain Braindance: New Discoveries about Human Origins and Evolution Dean Falk

The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science

Londa Schiebinger's adventure in scholarly sleuthing discovers the hidden, finds the lost, and celebrates the forgotten women in medicine and science in Western Europe and America from the 16th through the 19th centuries. This important, intellectually powerful book is often very funny in relating historical reasons why there are so few women scientists. Seventeenth-century pundits, imitating Aristotle, asserted that women's brains were too cold and too soft to sustain rigorous thought. Some 18th-century theorists thought that female cranial cavities were too small to encompass powerful scientific brains. A common 19th-century belief was that vigorous exercise of a woman's brain shriveled her ovaries. And the great philosopher Hegel thought that women should study botany because the mind of a woman is as placid as a plant. Beyond comedic virtues, this book's true power lies in its revelation of women's scientific achievements and its recasting of the question at hand: why are

Are men's and women's brains really different?

Are men's and women's brains really different?

PHYSICAL DEVELOPMENT OF WOMEN.

civilization is hard upon the women, remarked a highly cultivated woman as she sat in my office discussing the way by which she could be restored to her usual vigor. This remark was called forth by my insistence upon the statement that nothing but absolute rest would enable the overwrought mind and body to recover their usual tone. The family inheritance of acumen and mental vigor, which had carried a brother to a seat upon the bench of the Supreme Court of our State, had sent the sister into all kinds of philanthropic works. These, and looking well to the ways of her household, had made serious inroads upon a once vigorous constitution. Our civilization is hard upon women only because they are in a state of transition from the wholly material to the entirely intellectual. When all that was required of woman's brain was to read a little

EVOLUTION OF GIRLS.

The question whether man has ascended from the monkey or descended from little lower than the angels does not matter in the present discussion; also whether women have passed to a higher or lower plane in the evolution of our higher woman; whether it is a higher sphere to wield the keen, logical brain of a Maria Mitchell or to be the mother of a host of well trained sons as Cornelia, is not pertinent to the present subject. For the reason that popular opinion, before which we all fall prostrate, says woman's brain, whatever its capacity, must be made to hold a certain amount of book lore which we call an education. Sometimes when we have this erudition applied we think with the poet, Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers. Go on to perfection is the motto written above every scientific laboratory door; and one of the most weighty