Institut de Neurociències, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain.
Department of Psychiatry, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA.
Neurosci Biobehav Rev. 2019 Aug;103:81-108. doi: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2019.05.020. Epub 2019 May 23.
Despite the exponential increase in fear research during the last years, few studies have included female subjects in their design. The need to include females arises from the knowledge gap of mechanistic processes underlying the behavioral and neural differences observed in fear extinction. Moreover, the exact contribution of sex and hormones in relation to learning and behavior is still largely unknown. Insights from this field could be beneficial as fear-related disorders are twice as prevalent in women compared to men. Here, we review an up-to-date summary of animal and human studies in adulthood that report sex differences in fear extinction from a structural and functional approach. Furthermore, we describe how these factors could contribute to the observed sex differences in fear extinction during normal and pathological conditions.
尽管近年来恐惧研究呈指数级增长，但很少有研究在其设计中纳入女性受试者。之所以需要纳入女性，是因为我们对恐惧消退中观察到的行为和神经差异的机制过程知之甚少。此外，性和激素与学习和行为的具体关系仍在很大程度上不为人知。这一领域的研究结果可能会有所帮助，因为与恐惧相关的障碍在女性中的患病率是男性的两倍。在这里，我们综述了来自成年动物和人类研究的最新研究综述，这些研究从结构和功能的角度报告了恐惧消退中的性别差异。此外，我们还描述了这些因素如何导致正常和病理条件下恐惧消退中观察到的性别差异。
