Scientist scans her own brain 75 times to study the effects of birth control pills

Carina Heller has found a creative way to donate her brain to science — while she’s still using it.

The University of Minnesota neuroscientist wanted to get a better understanding of how birth control pills impact the brain, so she spent 75 sessions in an MRI machine to find out.

“It was actually not that hard, to be honest, because I knew what I was doing it for and I was really excited that we were able to do the study,” Heller told As It Happens host Nil Köksal.

Heller is working to make her brain data available to other scientists in the hopes of adding to what she sees as a dearth of research into women’s brains broadly, and the neurological impact of oral contraceptives in particular.

“Although this medication has been around for [decades], this research field is still very small,” she said.

Why women’s bodies are understudied

Since hormonal birth control pills hit the market in the ’60s, they have, by and large, proven to be both safe and effective. But even after all this time, Heller says, there are unknowns.

“We know that some women develop symptoms of depression and anxiety using oral contraceptives, and some women thrive using this kind of medication,” she said. “And I was just curious why.”

But when she started looking into the existing research, she found only a few hundred studies that mention keywords like “oral contraceptives and mental health” or “oral contraceptives and MRI.”

She says that’s “a very small number” considering how long these medications have been in wide use. 

It’s a problem, she says, that goes far beyond her own research interests.

“Women and females have always been considered to be just the smaller version of a male body, so the male body has always been the norm when it comes to biomedical research,” she said.

“Just because the research is so small and there’s so little published, it’s just easier for us to be, like, the participant ourselves to get the research done.”

Dr. Annie Duchesne, a psychology and gender studies professor at the University of British Columbia, calls this an “androcentric bias” —  when information about male bodies becomes the “norm” and is used to draw broader conclusions about people of all sexes and genders.

When that happens, she says, “we kind of have this implicit erasure of the needs and questions about other bodies.”

She says she welcomes Heller’s contribution, but also warned researchers need to be careful not to create new biases and new norms as they work to correct for decades of a male-centred approach. Science, she says, is best when it incorporates people from different backgrounds, locations, gender identities and sexes.

“Therefore, the conclusions that are drawn from it can actually have durability,” she said. 

Gilmore Girls and Emily in Paris

Over the course of Heller’s research, she would get up early every morning and hop into an MRI machine at 7:30 a.m.

Her colleagues scanned her 25 times over three five-week periods: before she started taking birth control, after she had been taking them for three months, and after she had stopped for three months. 

Inside the machine, her only job was to stay as still and calm as possible, while trying not to fall asleep. So she binged TV.

“I knew that I like Gilmore Girls. I’ve watched it, like, a million times. So I knew that it wouldn’t, like, get me too excited watching it,” she said. 

She also watched Emily in Paris. “I didn’t watch the last season because it was so boring, so that would not have helped in keeping me awake,” she said with a laugh.

The pros and cons of studying oneself

There’s a rich history, Duchesne says, of scientists experimenting on themselves, especially in neurology. She says the data that comes from that kind of work can be incredibly rich in some ways, but limited in others.

In Heller’s case, Duchesne says it’s especially useful to see brain scans before, during and after the use of birth control pills, encompassing entire menstrual cycle

“In terms of quantitative data analysis, 75 scans is a lot of data points,” she said. 

But she cautioned against drawing widespread conclusions from a single subject, even if that subject is also an expert. 

“You only have one participant, so the phenomenon is the phenomenon you observe in one person,” she said. “And not only that, but you also have the experimenter’s knowledge and motivation and perspective that cannot be controlled for.”

Heller says she and her colleagues are just starting to look at the data they’ve gathered, and have not yet published any findings.

Some very early analysis, she says, suggests that her brain’s volume and the interconnectedness between regions of her brain fluctuated throughout her menstrual cycles, and both seemed to dip slightly when she was taking the pill.

But, she cautioned, it’s far too early to draw any conclusions about what that means. Instead, she sees it as a starting point for her team and other scientists to build off.

“There are so many possibilities, and so many different ways of how this data can be analyzed,” she said. “If I would just do this all by myself, then it would take like, 15 to 20 years.”