Stress and the Reproductive Axis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There exists a reciprocal relationship between the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) and the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal (HPG) axes, wherein the activation of one affects the function of the other and vice versa. For example, both testosterone and oestrogen modulate the response of the HPA axis, whereas activation of the stress axis, especially activation that is repeating or chronic, has an inhibitory effect upon oestrogen and testosterone secretion. Alterations in maternal care can produce significant effects on both HPG and HPA physiology, as well as behaviour in the offspring at adulthood. For example, changes in reproductive behaviour induced by altered maternal care may alter the expression of sex hormone receptors such as oestrogen receptor (ER)α that govern sexual behaviour, and may be particularly important in determining the sexual strategies utilised by females. Stress in adulthood continues to mediate HPG activity in females through activation of a sympathetic neural pathway originating in the hypothalamus and releasing norepinephrine into the ovary, which produces a noncyclic anovulatory ovary that develops cysts. In the opposite direction, sex differences and sex steroid hormones regulate the HPA axis. For example, although serotonin (5-HT) has a stimulatory effect on the HPA axis in humans and rodents that is mediated by the 5-HT1A receptor, only male rodents respond to 5-HT1A antagonism to show increased corticosterone responses to stress. Furthermore, oestrogen appears to decrease 5-HT1A receptor function at presynaptic sites, yet increases 5-HT1A receptor expression at postsynaptic sites. These mechanisms could explain the heightened stress HPA axis responses in females compared to males. Studies on female rhesus macaques show that chronic stress in socially subordinate female monkeys produces a distinct behavioural phenotype that is largely unaffected by oestrogen, a hyporesponsive HPA axis that is hypersensitive to the modulating effects of oestrogen, and changes in 5-HT1A receptor binding in the hippocampus and hypothalamus of social subordinate female monkeys that are restored or inverted by oestrogen replacement. This review summarises all of these studies, emphasising the profound effect that the interaction of the reproductive and stress axes may have on human reproductive health and emotional wellbeing.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".