OHSU study: Testosterone deprivation makes ...( e prefrontal cortex doesn't participate...),Health

The next step in the research is to use brain imaging to assess the function of the hippocampus in men on testosterone deprivation therapy, which will be developed at OHSU's Advanced Imaging Research Center. One study will look at changes in blood flow in parts of the brain that are activated during the memory tests, and another will examine the effects of testosterone deprivation on structures in the brain.

"We can see during each task what parts of the brain are active and how the two brains (testosterone deprived versus normal ) differ," Bussiere said.

Janowsky, whose laboratory focuses on how cognition changes with aging, said healthy older men, on average, have about a 40 percent loss in their normal levels of testosterone as they age, from the ages of 20 or 30, to 70, but that some men in their 80s can have normal and high testosterone levels like men half their age.

"This is an important first step in an effort to fully understand how prostate cancer therapies adversely affect memory and other brain functions, and to develop therapies that do not produce such undesirable effects," said Tomasz Beer, M.D., associate professor of medicine and director of the OHSU Cancer Institute Prostate Cancer Research Program. Beer was a co-investigator in the effort

'"/>

Contact: Jonathan Modie
modiej@ohsu.edu
503-494-8231
Oregon Health & Science University
25-Oct-2004