Mental Health, Mitochondria, and the Battle of the Sexes.
Paola BressanPeter KramerPublished in: Biomedicines (2021)
This paper presents a broad perspective on how mental disease relates to the different evolutionary strategies of men and women and to growth, metabolism, and mitochondria-the enslaved bacteria in our cells that enable it all. Several mental disorders strike one sex more than the other; yet what truly matters, regardless of one's sex, is how much one's brain is "female" and how much it is "male". This appears to be the result of an arms race between the parents over how many resources their child ought to extract from the mother, hence whether it should grow a lot or stay small and undemanding. An uneven battle alters the child's risk of developing not only insulin resistance, diabetes, or cancer, but a mental disease as well. Maternal supremacy increases the odds of a psychosis-spectrum disorder; paternal supremacy, those of an autism-spectrum one. And a particularly lopsided struggle may invite one or the other of a series of syndromes that come in pairs, with diametrically opposite, excessively "male" or "female" characteristics. By providing the means for this tug of war, mitochondria take center stage in steadying or upsetting the precarious balance on which our mental health is built.
Keyphrases
- mental health
- cell death
- insulin resistance
- spectrum disorder
- mental illness
- reactive oxygen species
- type diabetes
- endoplasmic reticulum
- cell cycle arrest
- induced apoptosis
- cardiovascular disease
- autism spectrum disorder
- oxidative stress
- metabolic syndrome
- papillary thyroid
- adipose tissue
- squamous cell carcinoma
- high fat diet
- genome wide
- glycemic control
- white matter
- body mass index
- cell proliferation
- blood brain barrier
- pregnant women
- functional connectivity
- subarachnoid hemorrhage
- lymph node metastasis
- high fat diet induced
- weight loss