Women often get cold more easily than men — a mouse study offers hints why
It's a common observation that women often prefer warmer temperatures and feel cold more easily than men do, and the same trend appears among females of other species.
Key points
- 28 in the Journal of Physiology, found that these sensors activate at higher temperatures in female mice, which appears to shift their preferred temperature roughly 7 degrees Fahrenheit (4 degrees Celsius) higher than that of male mice.
- "You could say it's just a cute observation of no particular importance," said study co-author Peter McNaughton, a pharmacologist at King's College London who studies pain, thermal sensation and thermoregulation.
- Weeks after the treatment, these mice spent more time on the 38 C plate than males with normal testosterone.
"Females are a little bit more responsive to activation of the cold receptor," Caterina said, "and a little bit less responsive to activation of the warmer receptor." That's despite the temperature-sensing neurons in both sets of mice working identically, the team found.
Additional details
- Now, a study offers new clues as to what drives this preference — and testosterone may play a part.
- Beyond humans, it is known that many female animals, including mice and birds, prefer slightly warmer temperatures than their male counterparts do.
- They put 30 male and 27 female mice on two adjacent plates of different temperatures — one at 91.4 degrees Fahrenheit (33 degrees Celsius) and another that varied between lower and higher temperatures.
- "Since the top of the cage was completely open, there was no question of the air temperature affecting the mice," McNaughton said, so the preference was driven solely by the sensors in their skin.
- Skin carries sensors to detect heat and cold that influence each organism's decision to stay in or move out of an environment.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
Advertisement
Every article behind this summary — 1 article from 1 outlet
Get stories like this in your inbox.
Subscribe — it's freeOne free email at 6am — your topics, deduplicated, five minutes. No account, no paywall.