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Published online 6 April 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.339
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Testosterone boost doesn't fuel risky behaviour in women
Hormones could matter less on the trading floor than suspected.
Women given testosterone for a month were no more likely than women not receiving the hormone to engage in risky financial decisions, according to researchers in Sweden. The findings could suggest that women are a safer pair of hands on the stock-market trading floor than men — or throw into doubt earlier findings about the effect of the hormone on men.
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Until we are able to monitor the daily hormone levels of postmenopausal women, none of this anecdotal information is meaningful. When we can accurately monitor hormone levels and replace them in a physiologic manner, the postmenopausal disease state (with all of its medical and behavioral ramifications) will begin to come under control. This will give women the ability to regain their femininity and assure a healthier life style in their later years.
One woman's risk-taking behavior is different from the next. Comparing one woman taking testosterone to another that is not, is like comparing apples to oranges. I think the study should have used the same set of women as controls (rather than other women). In other words, don't give them testosterone, evaluate their risk-taking behavior; then give them the testosterone, and do the same. This way, they are able to evaluate the effects of testosterone on each individual's risk-taking behavior. Put differently, they are able to compare apples to apples.
The article Nature refers to only tests women who are post menopausal--the women are 50-65 years old. It must be understood that decision-making changes (such as increased risk-taking) occur as a result of sex hormones ONLY if the changes may increase the chance of mating--this is an evolutionary function. It is necessary to use humans who are able to conceive. I don't think it is realistic to assume that women who's reproductive cycles have already been closed permanently can be triggered to reopen for a couple of months. Because the hormones used in the experiment are associated with reproductive urges, when these hormones change naturally or artificially, then risk-taking may change as a result of the call of nature to reproduce and not "just" because the hormones were changed. In other words the hormones are responding to something. There are plenty of studies in which this is shown: men may become more aggressive in risk taking IF they have higher basal testosterone levels AND IF young and sexy females are present. If we remove the women, the stimulus for which the increase in testosterone would respond to is gone. Evolutionary hormones do not play games; they play by rules. The authors of the article Zethraeus, N. et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA have ignored a basic scientific principle in which they should have considered "objectively" their research topic. But they wanted to prove that research findings by others in hormonal stimuli experiments are caused by what they call "publication bias" in which the researchers aim to prove their research findings by their hypotheses as much as they are proving their hypotheses with their research findings--a circular argument. However, in trying to prove this, what Zethraeus et al., have actually shown is how perfectly they themselves used the same principle by choosing only post-menopausal women, whose reproductive cycles could not possibly be affected by any amount of sex hormone, thereby guaranteeing that their results will indeed conflict with all other results! Whether this finding actually has any meaning is well overlooked by most! It is a shame that Nature editors did not notice this major error in PNAS's publication and it is a surprise that such article can pass reviewers in any scientific journal of high quality!