The first meeting of the newly founded Society for Behavioral Neuroendocrinology will be sponsored jointly by The Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland School of Medicine. The meeting will feature about 175 scientific presentations on research probing the interrelationship between hormones, the brain and behavior. For example, scientists have learned that hormones can induce changes in the hippocampus, a structure in the front of the brain that is critical for memory in humans.
Hormones also regulate feelings of satiety and are important for the control of appetite.
Other findings show that estrogen plays a key role in learning and memory, and the hormone may provide protection against Alzheimer's disease. Such hormones induce genes inside brain cells to produce proteins that ultimately cause changes in brain structures. The structural changes, in turn, result in changing behavior. Basic research in the field with animals has yielded important findings that are relevant to clinical research on people in areas such as Alzheimer's disease, cancer, obesity, reproductive function and behavior. For example, scientists have been studying how environmental pollutants called estrogenic compounds can cause cancer and have profound effects on the reproductive function of animals.