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In ��������Ƶriosity, experts across the ��������Ƶ Boulder campus answer pressing questions about humans, our planet and the universe beyond.

This week, Zoe Donaldson, a professor in the departments of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology and Psychology and Neuroscience, answers: "What is Love?"

For centuries, romantics have turned to musicians, artists, writers and philosophers in their quest to define one of humankind’s most complex, and arguably critical, emotions.

Neuroscientist Zoe Donaldson takes a different approach. She looks to fuzzy, palm-sized rodents called prairie voles.

“From a neuroscientific perspective, love is the biological drive that allows us to form relationships,” she explains, as a family of four hungry newborn voles chase their mom around a glass enclosure in her office, their dad looking on.

The scene unfolding behind her says a lot about the evolutionary utility of love, she explains: It enables babies to bond with mothers who provide them with food and siblings who protect them and keep them warm. For some, it ultimately leads them to a mate, with which they reproduce, perpetuating the species. 

“The vast majority of rodents out there mate and leave. But these guys are different,” she says.

Like humans, and only about 5% of all mammal species, prairie voles can form long-term bonds with a partner, staying together to build a home and raise offspring. They also experience something akin to longing when separated from their partner and grief when their partner dies. This makes them ideal for studying the neurochemical glue that bonds are made of, she says.

Three brain chemicals play a starring role in this love story: Dopamine, oxytocin and vasopressin.

Dopamine, the same brain chemical at the root of dependency to cocaine, heroin, alcohol and other drugs of addiction, appears to draw us in and keep us coming back. 

“There’s essentially more dopamine being released in the brain when an animal is engaging in an effort that will gain them access to their partner,” Donaldson says, noting that when a prairie vole presses a lever that opens a door leading to their partner, their tiny brain is awash with the endogenous love drug. “We think of this as a chemical signature of desire within the brain.”

(Importantly, she adds, dopamine is designed to do this to help us execute our daily lives, unlike when it is hijacked by drugs of abuse.)

  Previously in ��������Ƶriosity

What is the smallest thing in the universe?

Or read more ��������Ƶriosity stories here

Oxytocin is probably best known for its not-particularly-romantic role as the drug given to laboring women to induce contractions. But it also nudges the maternal brain to want to take care of a newborn and stimulates milk production when an infant suckles. In prairie voles (and likely in people), the brain produces oxytocin when lovers couple up for the first time.

Vasopressin, the yang to Oxytocin’s yin, is a particularly important ingredient for helping males to form a bond, says Donaldson. It makes blood pressure rise and warms up the body, pleasant sensations worth coming back for. It can also make males a bit more aggressive, which comes in handy when (at least in the wild) males need to defend their territory.

"Each of these molecules is evolutionarily ancient,” says Donaldson. “We find them in worms and snails, where they are also important for motivation and social interaction.”

By studying these and other brain chemicals, Donaldson hopes to better understand not only what brings people together but also: What prevents some people from being able to form such bonds? Or renders others unable to bounce back, and reengage with life, when they lose a loved one (a disorder known as prolonged grief disorder)?

But is love just a collection of brain chemicals?

Donaldson gets that question a lot and doesn’t love the way it’s phrased.

“Adding ‘just’ into the question diminishes the fact that your brain chemistry is ultimately the seat of love,” she says. “We are beginning to learn that love is not something you have to learn, but something that is literally hard-wired into our brain from the moment we are born.”

You can’t get much more romantic than that.

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Women who go through menopause later in life have healthier blood vessels for years to come than those who go through it earlier, according to new ��������Ƶ Boulder research.

The study, published in the American Heart Association journal , offers new insight into why females who stop menstruating later are significantly less likely to have heart attacks and strokes in their postmenopausal years.

Arriving just in time for Women’s Heart Health month, the findings could help lead to new therapies, including dietary interventions, to reduce risk of heart disease which is the No. 1 killer of women.

“Our paper identifies that there’s actually a physiological benefit to later-onset menopause and is one of the first to identify the specific mechanisms driving these benefits,” said first author Sanna Darvish, a PhD candidate in the Department of Integrative Physiology.

Nearly half of women in the U.S. live with heart disease and it accounts for about female deaths each year. While females are less likely to die of a heart attack or stroke than males for most of their life, their risk spikes and overtakes male risk after menopause.

But there is one notable caveat to this trend.

Previous studies show that women who hit menopause—defined as going one year without a period—at age 55 or later are as much as 20% less likely to develop heart disease than those who cease menstruation at the usual 45 to 54 years old.

Darvish and her colleagues at ��������Ƶ’s Integrative Physiology of Aging Laboratory set out to determine why.

They assessed the vascular health of 92 women, looking specifically at a measure called brachial artery flow-mediated dilation (FMD), or how well their brachial artery—the main blood vessel in the upper arm—dilates with increased blood flow.

The team also measured the health of the women’s mitochondria, the energy powerhouses in the cells lining their blood vessels. And they took a close look at what molecules were coursing through their bloodstream.

Not surprisingly, all the postmenopausal women had significantly worse arterial function than their premenopausal counterparts. That’s in part because, as people age, they produce less nitric oxide, a compound that helps blood vessels dilate and keeps them from getting stiff and developing plaque. Mitochondria in cells lining the blood vessels also become dysfunctional with age and generate more damaging molecules called free radicals, explained Darvish.

A spike in risk

When menopause hits, the age-related decline in vascular health accelerates. But the 10% or so of women who experience late-onset menopause appear to be somewhat protected from this effect, said senior author Matthew Rossman.

For instance, the study found that vascular function was only 24% worse in the late-onset menopause group compared to the premenopausal group, while those in the normal-onset group had 51% worse vascular health.

Remarkably, such differences between the groups persisted five years or more after the women went through menopause, with the late-onset group still having 44% better vascular function than the normal onset group.

In the late-onset group mitochondria lso functioned better, producing fewer free radicals, the study found. The circulating blood of the two groups also looked different, with the late-onset group showing “more favorable” levels of 15 different lipid, or fat, -related metabolites in their blood.

“Our data suggest that women who complete menopause at a later age have a kind of natural inherent protection from vascular dysfunction that can come from oxidative stress over time,” said Rossman, an assistant research professor in the Department of Integrative Physiology.

More research is necessary to determine exactly what drives that protection, but the researchers suspect better mitochondrial function and certain lipids circulating in their blood may play a role.

Next, the team plans to explore how early-onset menopause might impact heart health, and whether nutritional supplements aimed at neutralizing free radicals inside blood vessels might reduce heart disease risk in women at greater risk.

In one previous study, Rossman found initial evidence that MitoQ—a chemically altered version of the antioxidant Coenzyme Q10 that targets mitochondria—reversed blood vessel aging significantly within weeks in male and female subjects. A larger clinical trial is now underway.

“We hope this work puts age at menopause on the map as a female-specific risk factor that women and their doctors discuss more,” said Darvish.

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People who get their news from an ideologically diverse array of sources are more likely to get vaccinated, regardless of their political affiliation, .

“This study shows that being exposed to a range of perspectives encourages critical thinking and makes people less likely to get stuck in a bubble or misled by misinformation,” said senior author Leaf Van Boven, a professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience.

Published in the journal Scientific Reports, the study is among the first to take a close look at how media consumption habits shape vaccine hesitancy, which the World Health Organization has named as one of the “top 10” global threats to public health. The study comes as nationwide, and remains lower than it was before the pandemic. President Donald Trump has also nominated outspoken vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

The researchers offer some advice for public health communicators wanting to boost trust and improve vaccine adherence: Encourage people to get out of their echo chambers.

“We as a society have kind of fallen into this belief that you can’t change other people’s minds, but this paper goes to show that when people are introduced to new ideas and evidence, they can make more informed choices and they are willing to change their beliefs,” said Dani Grant, first author of the study and a doctoral candidate at ��������Ƶ Boulder.

Media diet

As part of a larger project exploring public sentiments about COVID-19, Van Boven and Grant surveyed nearly 1,700 people in the spring of 2022, when vaccines and boosters were readily available to the public. The researchers asked respondents their age, ethnicity, education and political affiliation—factors that have previously been shown to shape vaccine adherence—and also asked them to rank how much they got their news from 20 different news outlets.

Outlets ranged from Breitbart News Network and Fox News on the conservative side to MSNBC and Democracy Now on the liberal side. The researchers determined a publication’s ideological tilt using bias ratings from All Sides and Ad Fontes Media, independent media intelligence organizations.

The team gave each respondent a media diversity score based on their answers.

At the time, 21% of those surveyed were not vaccinated, 17% were vaccinated, and 62% were vaccinated and boosted.

The study found that people who reported consuming more conservative media were significantly less likely to be vaccinated and boosted. The researchers noted that, for example, Fox News pundit Sean Hannity told viewers at the time that COVID-19 was made up by the “deep state,” and then-Fox business anchor Trish Regan characterized the virus as “a scam.”

Echo chambers

The most interesting finding, Grant and Van Boven said, was that when people consumed a diverse media diet, even if it included a range of conservative outlets, they still tended to get vaccinated.

“People who consumed news and opinions from a variety of political perspectives were more likely to be vaccinated, even after accounting for their political affiliation, age, gender, race and education,” said Van Boven.

When it came to trust in science, media consumption also had a notable influence. Those who consumed only left-leaning media had very high trust in science, while those who consumed only right-leaning media were highly skeptical.

The authors said that understanding the factors associated with vaccine hesitancy is critical not only for addressing the ongoing threat of COVID-19 but also for tackling other diseases like influenza, measles and whooping cough. Vaccination rates for all three diseases are declining in the United States.

“When people delay or refuse vaccines, we see avoidable deaths, illness and economic losses,” said Van Boven. “Vaccines are among our most effective public health tools, but their power depends on public trust.”

To regain trust, scientists and public health officials might also do well to step out of their own echo chambers, Grant said, sharing their perspectives and research with outlets they may not typically engage with.

“This is an opportunity for scientists to reflect on where we are not being as constructive as we could be,” she said. “I think that we should all be interacting across the media spectrum.” 

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