Psychology master’s student Alison Randell wants to better understand the effects of hormonal birth control on the adolescent brain.

“We know how different hormonal contraceptives will affect physical parameters like bone density, but there’s not a lot of research looking at how they work in the brain at the molecular level,” she says. “I’m doing some preclinical research to try and get at some of those underlying mechanisms that might be causing different side effects.”

Randell is studying levonorgestrel, a synthetic version of progesterone called a progestin. She is curious about how levonorgestrel interacts with the regions of the brain involved with regulating anxiety, especially in teens.

Levonorgestrel is often used in combination with other hormones in hormonal contraceptives (HC), but because the hormonal intrauterine device (IUD) is progestin-only, and levonorgestrel has not often been studied in isolation, her findings could ultimately inform how HCs are prescribed and used to mitigate risks of negative side effects.

“Levonorgestrel is a synthetic progestin derived from testosterone that interferes with the uterine environment to prevent pregnancy,” Randell says. “But some studies have found that using it can increase the risk of depression and anxiety, among other affective conditions.”

Her research was recently recognized with a Women’s Health Scholars Award from the Council of Ontario Universities.

“Not everyone who takes birth control will become depressed or anxious — a lot of people find it helps with their moods and it’s used as treatment for a variety of different conditions, not just menstrual conditions,” Randell says. “My work is to help understand the effects to see a bit more why certain people are susceptible to experiencing negative effects of these HCs as opposed to having them be helpful in the way that’s intended.”

Randell says she was attracted to Brock’s Psychology graduate programs because of Professor Cheryl McCormick’s work on adolescent development. In her first year, she worked with postdoctoral fellow Jesse Lacasse, who was also doing hormonal contraceptive research, in the McCormick Developmental Social Neuroscience lab.

“I got really interested in women’s health and started to focus different undergraduate class projects on birth control research,” she says. “A lot of preclinical research on mood disorders previously looked at males only, and that’s now leading to people asking different questions or having to repeat questions that haven’t looked at females.”

Supported by a Canadian Institute of Health Research (CIHR) Travel Award, which is funded by the Government of Canada, Randell recently travelled to Vancouver to present a poster at the annual meeting of the Society for Behavioural Neuroendocrinology, for which McCormick edits the journal Hormones and Behaviour. That study showed how frequent levonorgestrel treatment reduced previously documented differences in female and male responses to stressful tasks.

Randell says it was exciting to share her work, which she hopes will continue beyond her master’s degree.

“I’ll always be in the middle of the research because there’s always another question,” she says. “After I ran the study last December with repeated exposure to levorgonestrel, I decided I then wanted to look at acute effects of a single exposure, as opposed to chronic treatment. I’m also curious about whether there are any long-lasting effects that persist after exposure has stopped.”