Berglund Hans, Lindström Per, Savic Ivanka
Department of Medicine, and Stockholm Brain Institute, Karolinska University Hospital, Karolinska Institutet, 171 76 Stockholm, Sweden.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2006 May 23;103(21):8269-74. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0600331103. Epub 2006 May 16.
The progesterone derivative 4,16-androstadien-3-one (AND) and the estrogen-like steroid estra-1,3,5(10),16-tetraen-3-ol (EST) are candidate compounds for human pheromones. In previous positron emission tomography studies, we found that smelling AND and EST activated regions primarily incorporating the sexually dimorphic nuclei of the anterior hypothalamus, that this activation was differentiated with respect to sex and compound, and that homosexual men processed AND congruently with heterosexual women rather than heterosexual men. These observations indicate involvement of the anterior hypothalamus in physiological processes related to sexual orientation in humans. We expand the information on this issue in the present study by performing identical positron emission tomography experiments on 12 lesbian women. In contrast to heterosexual women, lesbian women processed AND stimuli by the olfactory networks and not the anterior hypothalamus. Furthermore, when smelling EST, they partly shared activation of the anterior hypothalamus with heterosexual men. These data support our previous results about differentiated processing of pheromone-like stimuli in humans and further strengthen the notion of a coupling between hypothalamic neuronal circuits and sexual preferences.
孕酮衍生物4,16 - 雄甾二烯 - 3 - 酮（AND）和雌激素样类固醇雌甾 - 1,3,5(10),16 - 四烯 - 3 - 醇（EST）是人类信息素的候选化合物。在先前的正电子发射断层扫描研究中，我们发现闻AND和EST会激活主要包含下丘脑前部性二态核的区域，这种激活在性别和化合物方面存在差异，并且同性恋男性对AND的处理方式与异性恋女性而非异性恋男性一致。这些观察结果表明下丘脑前部参与了与人类性取向相关的生理过程。在本研究中，我们通过对12名女同性恋者进行相同的正电子发射断层扫描实验，扩展了关于这个问题的信息。与异性恋女性不同，女同性恋者通过嗅觉网络而非下丘脑前部来处理AND刺激。此外，在闻EST时，她们与异性恋男性部分共享下丘脑前部的激活。这些数据支持了我们之前关于人类对类信息素刺激进行差异处理的结果，并进一步强化了下丘脑神经元回路与性偏好之间存在关联的概念。
