Grant: Canada Research Chairs

Evolutionary approaches in medicine provide transformative paradigms that drive data collection along novel, promising paths towards better understanding, treatment and prevention of disease. The main objective of Dr. Crespi’s CRC research program is to test recently-developed evolutionary-medical theory postulating that variation in female reproductive life history traits, and concomitant risks of endometriosis and polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), are mediated by levels of prenatal and postnatal testosterone that differentially program the developing hypothalamic-pituitary-ovarian system, and degrees of development of associated sexually-dimorphic and sex-limited traits. This innovative work integrates three main approaches: (1) studies of women with endometriosis or PCOS, in comparison to controls, that focus on prenatal and postnatal testosterone and other hormones in relation to reproductive physiology, especially in the context of energetics and brown adipose tissue, and their links to reproductive functioning, (2) studies of healthy women varying in sexually-dimorphic physical, developmental, physiological and psychological traits that are relevant to endometriosis and PCOS, to assess the roles of prenatal and postnatal testosterone in phenotypic covariation of the traits among non-clinical individuals exhibiting predominantly-adaptive trait covariation, and (3) studies that involve the development of a novel experimental animal model for endometriosis, based on artificially-selecting female mice, across multiple generations, for low testosterone, which is expected to lead to the evolution of endometriosis-associated traits through pleiotropic effects, and produce the first naturalistic animal model of this disorder. All three of these inter-related projects are highly novel in their evolutionary-medical frameworks, and they are significant in that they should lead to new insights into the causes and treatments of female reproductive disorders, as well as increased understanding of female reproductive adaptations.