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

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

The all-time-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 accept stated that, outside of pregnancy, the uterus lies in a fallow land, and does not collaborate with other organs.

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

In a report on the rat model, senior author Prof. Heather Bimonte-Nelson and colleagues demonstrated that removing the uterus — a surgical procedure known as hysterectomy — has a definite impact on spatial memory.

These findings, which appear in the journal Endocrinology, advise that this organ communicated with the brain, influencing some cognitive processes.

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

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

Prof. Heather Bimonte-Nelson

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

Prof. Bimonte-Nelson explains that the body'south autonomic nervous system, which regulates "automated" metabolic processes, such as center charge per unit, breathing, digestion, and sexual arousal, besides has links to the uterus and brain.

Starting from this connection between the uterus and the brain, the researchers wanted to know if the two collaborate in unobvious ways, and if removing the uterus would affect cerebral office.

To do and so, the investigators used female rats, which they divided into 4 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 i group, the researchers removed the rats' ovaries, in some other their uteruses, and in a third, the researchers removed both the ovaries and the uterus. The rats in the 4th group acted as controls, receiving a fake surgery in which their reproductive organs were left intact.

At 6 weeks afterwards the intervention, the investigators trained all the rats to navigate a complex maze structure. Then, they gradually modified dissimilar elements of this maze to run into how well the rodents' memories performed under these circumstances.

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

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

"The surgical removal of just the uterus had a unique and negative outcome on working memory, or how much information the rats were able to manage simultaneously, an result we saw afterward the rats learned the rules of the maze," explains kickoff author Stephanie Koebele, who is a psychology graduate student at Arizona Land University.

Post-obit this experiment, the researchers tried to notice an explanation for the potential mechanism that afflicted cognitive function in the rats that had undergone a hysterectomy.

First, they compared the shape and size of the ovaries in the rats that still retained them. However, this revealed nothing — all of these rodents presented ovaries of similar, normal advent.

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

"Fifty-fifty though the ovaries were structurally similar across all the groups, the hormones that were produced in the group that received hysterectomy lonely resulted in a unlike hormone profile," says Koebele.

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

The researchers practise not yet understand how the changed hormonal changes impact cognitive function, nor whether this impact is permanent or short-lived, simply they aim to find out by conducting further studies.

Below, you can picket Koebele and Prof. Bimonte-Nelson explain how they decided to conduct the electric current report, and why their findings are meaningful.