New research conducted in an beast model has uncovered an intriguing fact about the uterus, namely that it seems to interact with the brain and affect retention.

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The uterus may have other roles across reproduction, new research suggests, and removing the uterus could bear upon memory.

The best-known role of the uterus is its role in pregnancy, but does it serve any other purpose beyond that of reproduction?

So far, textbooks of obstetrics and gynecology take stated that, outside of pregnancy, the uterus lies in a dormant state, and does not interact with other organs.

However, new research from Arizona State University in Tempe may presently alter definitions referring to the role of this organ.

In a study on the rat model, senior writer Prof. Heather Bimonte-Nelson and colleagues demonstrated that removing the uterus — a surgical process known as hysterectomy — has a definite impact on spatial retentiveness.

These findings, which appear in the periodical Endocrinology, suggest that this organ communicated with the brain, influencing some cerebral processes.

"There is some research showing that women who underwent hysterectomy but maintained their ovaries had an increased risk for dementia if the surgery occurred before natural menopause," Prof. Bimonte-Nelson notes.

"This finding is striking. We wanted to investigate and understand whether the uterus itself could impact brain function."

Prof. Heather Bimonte-Nelson

While many people may know that the uterus and the ovaries have a connection due to their joint role in reproduction, they may not be aware of the links between the uterus and the brain.

Prof. Bimonte-Nelson explains that the body's autonomic nervous arrangement, which regulates "automatic" metabolic processes, such as heart rate, breathing, digestion, and sexual arousal, likewise has links to the uterus and brain.

Starting from this connectedness betwixt the uterus and the brain, the researchers wanted to know if the 2 collaborate in unobvious ways, and if removing the uterus would impact cognitive part.

To practise so, the investigators used female person rats, which they divided into four groups. The rats in iii of these groups underwent surgeries that mimicked the oophorectomies (surgical removal of the ovaries) and hysterectomies (surgical removal of the uterus) in humans.

In one group, the researchers removed the rats' ovaries, in another their uteruses, and in a third, the researchers removed both the ovaries and the uterus. The rats in the fourth grouping acted as controls, receiving a imitation surgery in which their reproductive organs were left intact.

At six weeks later on the intervention, the investigators trained all the rats to navigate a circuitous maze construction. So, they gradually modified different elements of this maze to see how well the rodents' memories performed under these circumstances.

The researchers constitute that the female rats that had undergone hysterectomies found it more challenging to navigate the maze than any of the rats in the other groups.

None of the other kinds of surgery appeared to take whatsoever bear upon on the rats' spatial memories or the number of mistakes they fabricated while attempting to navigate the maze.

"The surgical removal of but the uterus had a unique and negative effect on working retention, or how much information the rats were able to manage simultaneously, an consequence we saw later the rats learned the rules of the maze," explains first author Stephanie Koebele, who is a psychology graduate student at Arizona Country University.

Following this experiment, the researchers tried to find an explanation for the potential machinery that affected cerebral function in the rats that had undergone a hysterectomy.

First, they compared the shape and size of the ovaries in the rats that withal retained them. However, this revealed null — all of these rodents presented ovaries of similar, normal appearance.

When they tested the levels of various hormones, however, the investigators noticed that the rats in the hysterectomy-just group had a different hormonal profile compared with the ones in the control group.

"Even though the ovaries were structurally similar across all the groups, the hormones that were produced in the group that received hysterectomy lone resulted in a different hormone profile," says Koebele.

"Hormones affect both brain and other body systems, and having an altered hormonal profile could bear on the trajectory of cognitive crumbling and could create different health risks," she explains.

The researchers do non yet empathise how the inverse hormonal changes touch on cerebral office, nor whether this impact is permanent or short-lived, but they aim to detect out by conducting further studies.

Below, you tin can sentinel Koebele and Prof. Bimonte-Nelson explicate how they decided to deport the electric current report, and why their findings are meaningful.