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"Unlike the females, the researchers found that male twins do not experience long-term consequences of being exposed to a female twin in utero."
by dooglius 8y ago
"Unlike the females, the researchers found that male twins do not experience long-term consequences of being exposed to a female twin in utero."
- belorn 8y agoSince the mother already have a lot of estrogen in her blood, it might simply be that the effect of a female twin does not impact the amount of circulating hormones. The effect of increased estrogen in the male twin similar to the increase in testosterone in female twins would be interesting, but it might just not be something that can occur naturally. Thus if I speculate a bit, the reason for the non-symetric effect should be that the mother and father does not have symmetric roles during the pregnancy. If half the time it was the father that carried the child we would likely have seen a similar effect on males with female twins. What would be interesting is if they looked at mothers with different levels of estrogen and see if that effects male offspring, in particular those with exceptional high and low levels.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Causality1 8y agoThat's not what I asked. I asked what effect in utero testosterone had on boys. Did they have lower metrics than their sisters? Did boys with higher levels of in utero testosterone have lower metrics than boys with lower levels of in utero testosterone?
- ska 8y agoI'm not sure how they would go about experiment design for this. In the case of twins they know the mechanism for increased testosterone, and they have a big control population. Short of everyone having a prenatal hormone measurement (which presumably is not done typically) how would you identify the subjects?