Scientists seek women who suffe...( CHAPEL HILL University of North Caroli...)

These are women who are clinically depressed or anxious for a week or more before menstruation or who have such irritability that emotional symptoms interfere with their ability to function or damage their interpersonal relationships, said Dr. Susan Girdler, associate professor of psychiatry at the UNC School of Medicine. We are not talking about most women who have the most common PMS symptoms but the 5 to 10 percent who are really emotionally distraught.

Volunteers will be paid $500 for several visits to UNC lasting several hours each, Girdler said. They also will receive useful information about their illness, including evaluation with state-of-the-art diagnostic instruments.

Anyone who wants to volunteer can call Astrid at (919) 966-2547 for more information. Researchers, who are especially interested in depression, also are seeking women without PMS but who have had major depression to serve as controls.

Clinicians have known for a long time that female sex hormones are associated in some way with PMS and the more serious premenstrual dysphoric disorder because neither occurs before puberty and both disappear after menopause, Girdler said.

Paradoxically, women who have PMDD have completely normal ovarian function and show the same hormone levels as other women and the same cycles, she said. They are much more sensitive to pain than other women, however.

Last year, the UNC researchers published a preliminary study in the journal Biological Psychiatry showing that healthy women responded to stress during the second half of their monthly cycles by producing more allopregnanolone, a hormone metabolite of the female hormone progesterone.

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Contact: David Williamson
david_williamson@unc.edu
919-962-8596
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
11-Mar-2002