Stuff I learned from @jenngarrison about her work in studying female reproductive biology and the neuroscience of aging:
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On a slight tangent: we also do not know what signals the onset of birth contractions. (No, it’s not just oxytocin, that’s a peripheral signal to smooth muscle at the very end of the process. The cervix is softening up for weeks before. Which is why induced labor kicks so much!)
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The master switch for female reproductive changes, as for most hormones, is in the hypothalamus. And the cool thing is that we can stick a tiny camera in there, in an awake mouse, and track neuronal activity, and even turn specific clusters on and off with optogenetics.
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You can do all kinds of freaky things by stimulating different parts of the hypothalamus: make a mouse drink, make it lose or gain weight, alter sexual activity, etc.
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And of course a lot of these hypothalamic responses get disrupted with age, and you can delay aging by manipulating the hypothalamus (eg heating it makes mice live longer!)
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so similar methods are probably usable to understand how female reproductive function is regulated and changes with age (albeit not true menopause; you're not going to get to drill holes in healthy women's skulls For Science.)
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End of conversation
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