Archival ReportBlockade of Estrogen by Hormonal Contraceptives Impairs Fear Extinction in Female Rats and Women
Section snippets
Human Participants
In experiment 1, we recruited a cohort of healthy women (n = 13) using combined monophasic HCs (Table S1 in Supplement 1) and contrasted their data to a previously studied cohort of naturally cycling women who underwent the same experimental design while in a high estradiol (H-EST) or low estradiol (L-EST) state, as determined by serum analyses (11) (see Supplement 1 for details). In experiment 5, we recruited a cohort of naturally cycling women (n=31) to participate ∼5 days after the onset of
Experiment 1: HCs Impair Fear Extinction in Healthy Women
Skin conductance responses to conditioned and extinguished stimuli from women using HCs were compared with naturally cycling women who were high (H-EST) or low (L-EST) in estradiol. No group differences were observed across conditioning [F(2,44)=.63, p=.54]. Skin conductance responses at the end of extinction training were significantly less than those during conditioning [F(1,42)=16.30, p<.0001], with no effect of group [F(2,42)=.79, p=.47] or phase-by-group interaction [F(2,42)=.44, p=.65],
Discussion
The present experiments demonstrated that although HCs had little or no effect on fear conditioning and acquisition of extinction, they significantly impaired extinction recall. The impairment was prevented in rats by terminating HCs or by administering ER agonists before extinction training, and pre-extinction estradiol administration also prevented extinction impairments in early-follicular women. Hormonal contraceptives reduce ovarian hormones, and we found that manipulations that increased
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