Another reason to keep posting!

[Sally]

> UCLA Study on Friendship Among Women
>
> An Alternative to fight or flght - 2002, Gale
> Berkowitz
>
>
> A landmark UCLA study suggests friendships between
> women are special. They shape who we are and who we
> are yet to be. They soothe our tumultuous inner
> world, fill the emotional gaps in our marriage, and
> help us remember who we really are. By the way, they
> may do even more. Scientists now suspect that
> hanging out with our friends can actually counteract
> the kind of stomach-quivering stress most of us
> experience on a daily basis.
>
> A landmark UCLA study suggests that women respond to
> stress with a cascade of brain chemicals that cause
> us to make and maintain friendships with other
> women. It's a stunning find that has turned five
> decades of stress research-most of it on men-upside
> down. Until this study was published, scientists
> generally believed that when people experience
> stress, they trigger a hormonal cascade that revs
> the body to either stand and fight or flee as fast
> as possible, explains Laura Cousin Klein, Ph.D., now
> an Assistant Professor of Biobehavioral Health at
> Penn State University and one of the study's
> authors. It's an ancient survival mechanism left
> over from the time we were chased across the planet
> by saber-toothed tigers. Now the researchers
> suspect that women have a larger behavioral
> repertoire than just fight or flight; In fact, says
> Dr. Klein, it seems that when the hormone oxytocin
> is release as part of the stress responses in a
> woman, it buffers the fight or flight response and
> encourages her to tend children and gather with
> other women instead. When she actually engages in
> this tending or befriending, studies suggest that
> more oxytocin is released, which further counters
> stress and produces a calming effect.
>
> This calming response does not occur in men, says
> Dr. Klein, because testosterone-which men produce in
> high levels when they're under stress-seems to
> reduce the effects of oxytocin. Estrogen, she adds,
> seems to enhance it. The discovery that women
> respond to stress differently than men was made in a
> classic "aha" moment shared by two women scientists
> who were talking one day in a lab at UCLA. There was
> this joke that when the women who worked in the lab
> were stressed, they came in, cleaned the lab, had
> coffee, and bonded, says Dr. Klein. When the men
> were stressed, they holed up somewhere on their own.
> I commented one day to fellow researcher Shelley
> Taylor that nearly 90% of the stress research is on
> males. I showed her the data from my lab, and the
> two of us knew instantly that we were onto
> something. The women cleared their schedules and
> started meeting with one scientist after another
> from various research specialties. Very quickly,
> Drs. Klein and Taylor discovered that by not
> including women in stress research, scientists had
> made a huge mistake: The fact that women respond to
> stress differently than men has significant
> implications for
> our health.
>
>
> It may take some time for new studies to reveal all
> the ways that oxytocin encourages us to care for
> children and hang out with other women, but the
> "tend and befriend" notion developed by Drs. Klein
> and Taylor may explain why women consistently
> outlive men. Study after study has found that social
> ties reduce our risk of disease by lowering blood
> pressure, heart rate, and cholesterol. There's no
> doubt, says Dr. Klein, that friends are helping us
> live longer. In one study, for example, researchers
> found that people who had no friends increased their
> risk of death over a 6-month period.
>
> In another study, those who had the most friends
> over a 9-year period cut their risk of death by more
> than 60%. Friends are also helping us live better.
> The famed Nurses' Health Study from Harvard Medical
> School found that the more friends women had, the
> less likely they were to develop physical
> impairments as they aged, and the more likely they
> were to be leading a joyful life. In fact, the
> results were so significant, the researchers
> concluded, that not having close friends or
> confidants was as detrimental to your health as
> smoking or carrying extra weight. And that's not
> all. When the researchers looked at how well the
> women functioned after the death of their spouse,
> they found that even in the face of this biggest
> stressor of all, those women who had a close friend
> and confidante were more likely to survive the
> experience without any new physical impairments or
> permanent loss of vitality.
>
> Those without friends were not always so fortunate.
> Yet if friends counter the stress that seems to
> swallow up so much of our life these days, if they
> keep us healthy and even add years to our life, why
> is it so hard to find time to be with them? That's a
> question that also troubles researcher Ruthellen
> Josselson, Ph.D., co-author of Best Friends: The
> Pleasures and Perils of Girls' and Women's
> Friendships (Three Rivers Press, 1998). The
> following paragraph is, in my opinion, very, very
> true and something all women should be aware of and
> NOT put our female friends on the back burners.
> Every time we get overly busy with work and family,
> the first thing we do is let go of friendships with
> other women, explains Dr. Josselson. We push them
> right to the back burner. That's really a mistake
> because women are such a source of strength to each
> other. We nurture one another. And we need to have
> unpressured space in which we can do the special
> kind of talk that women do when they're with other
> women. It's a very healing experience.


Catherine Nathan, Director
First Regional Library

Catherine, the Ripper

[artteacher]

Yay Sally!

What a good post.

Wayne, you're welcome to join the group, despite the testoserone and all.

Love, Marsha

[MaggieRedwings]

Thanks Sally for such a great post & I agree with Marsha that Wayne can join the group too.

Love, Maggie

[kate_ce1995]

Well, I didn't have time to read the article, but the first paragraph sounds mightly compelling.

But Catherine the Ripper! Where has she been hiding? Does she know the address of this here site? I always enjoyed her posts too.

Katy

[tex]

Hahahahaha. Thanks Marsha and Maggie. Actually, after a couple of years of sharing experiences and gossip with all of you on these discussion forums, I find it much easier to appreciate the benefits of friendships with women. I still remember how scared I was to make that first post. LOL.

Love,
Wayne

[annie oakley]

You may have been scared that first post...but you are our hero!
Love Oma

[Mars]

I agree!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! There is a definate difference between men and women when experiencing stress!

I have also wondered, in the difference in reactions between the sexes, if MC is a "woman's" disease moreso than a mans or is it that men don't search for answers or join websites???

I'm really glad to have the male side of things discussed on this forum. It is odd that we have so few of them here - maybe you "guys" need to recruit! Well, we don't want others to be sick, I just find it interesting that the women out number the men drastically!

Any thoughts on that???

Love,
Mars

[Liz]

Maybe the fellas who may have MC believe the doctors that it is a female disease & the problems that they have are IBD or all in the mind. I really believe that it is under diagnosed & that there are not enough biopsies done.

Love

Liz

[tex]

Well, the doctors claim that the women patients outnumber the men by at least 4 or 5 to one, but then the doctors claim all sorts of things that don't seem to hold up under close scrutiny. They can't count someone in their statistics, if they don't show up and/or get properly diagnosed.

I have a very strong suspicion that the reason that my GI didn't take biopsies during my colonoscopy, was because I was a male, and he "knew" that as rare as MC is to begin with, there certainly wasn't any point in checking for it with a male patient. LOL.

Also, I discovered a couple of months ago, that a casual acquaintenance, (a male), had been diagnosed with MC back in January, but he wasn't interested in considering any support groups, or internet discussion boards, or whatever. He was interested in trying the GF diet, so I gave him a bunch of printouts, so he could give it a try, but I haven't seen him since, to ask how he's doing. At the time, he was trying to get by with OTC meds, and not eating whenever he had to go anywhere.

Anyway, I suspect that there are multiple reasons why few men show up on discussion boards such as this, not the least of which is spillover from the old joke about men's aversion to asking for directions when they're lost. LOL.

Love,
Tex

[Jean]

Sally,

Excellent research. I've been thinking about it all day and listening to women talk with a whole new perspective.

Love, Jean

[Lucy]

Sally,

Do you see a little irony in the fact that Catherine is "THE RIPPER?" Ha!

Hmm, make quilts not war, eh?

Yours, Luce