How is the brain affected from gender-affirming hormone treatment?

Tzepapadaki, Afroditi Adamantia (2021) How is the brain affected from gender-affirming hormone treatment? Master's Thesis / Essay, Biomedical Sciences.

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Abstract

Transgender individuals experience an incongruence between their gender identity and sex assigned at birth. When this incongruence is a cause for significant distress, it is characterized as gender dysphoria in the DSM-5. During the most recent years, gender dysphoria (GD) is gaining scientific interest due to the steadily increasing amount of referrals of transgender people experiencing GD symptoms. Clinically, patients with GD are treated with gender-affirming hormone treatment to enhance the biological sex characteristics of their identified gender. However, very little is known about the effects of this treatment on the brain of individuals with GD nor the neurobiological mechanisms behind GD. Up to recently, research was associating GD with altered cerebral sex dimorphism disregarding the main feature of GD, which is the strong perception of incongruence between one’s sense of self and one’s body. This essay aims to investigate the effect of gender-affirming hormone treatment on the brain from a structural and functional perspective with particular interest in neuronal circuit activation and connectivity mediating the self (“self-referential”) and own-body perception processes in an effort to gain further insight into the mechanisms underlying GD.

Item Type:	Thesis (Master's Thesis / Essay)
Supervisor name:	Buwalda, B. and Scheurink, A.J.W.
Degree programme:	Biomedical Sciences
Thesis type:	Master's Thesis / Essay
Language:	English
Date Deposited:	23 Dec 2021 11:06
Last Modified:	23 Dec 2021 11:06
URI:	https://fse.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/id/eprint/26410

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