Teen sex hits brain growth?

Teen sex hits brain growth?

Washington: Having sex during the adolescent years could negatively affect the mood and brain development during adulthood, a new study has claimed. One reason the researchers from the Ohio State University College of Medicines believe could be that during adolescence the nervous system is still in the developing phase that can have broad consequences.
    The researchers, who carried out their study on hamsters, found that the animals that mated earlier in life had higher levels of depressive behaviours, changes to the brain and smaller reproductive tissues compared to those that had intercourse later or not at all. “Having a sexual experience during this time point, early in life, is not without consequence,” study co-author John Morris, a doctoral student in psychology at Ohio State, was quoted as saying by LiveScience.
    However, the researchers cautioned that the study should not be used to promote teenage abstinence, as they noted that the research was carried out on hamsters and it isn’t certain the same conclusion will hold for humans. For their study, the researchers had a group of 40-day-old male hamsters (the equivalent of human teens) mate with adult females in heat. A second group of males mated in adulthood (80 days into life), while a control group was not exposed to females.
    The researchers found that the animals that had sex at 40 days when placed in water were more likely to stop swimming vigorously, a symptom of depression, than the other three groups. The group that had sex in adolescence also showed less complexity in the brain’s dendrites, the branching extensions of neurons that receive messages from other nerve cells, and higher expression of a gene associated with inflammation.