Madeleine Kördel

Last night's dinner and today’s talk from our external speaker, Vibe Frøkjær, from Denmark 🇩🇰

We had a wonderful evening discussing research, ideas, and collaborations ahead of today's colloquium!

We’re the International Research Training Group 2804 (IRTG 2804), an interdisciplinary community researching women’s mental health across hormonal transition phases — from puberty to pregnancy to menopause 👩🏼‍🔬

It was great to present my research at #WASAD2025 in Munich and contribute to the discussions on stress, hormones, and mental health!

✨ A huge thank you to my PI @nbkroemer.bsky.social and my colleagues @akuehnel.bsky.social and @mariame.bsky.social for all their support, feedback, and guidance throughout this project!

💡These findings highlight the importance of considering
metabolic factors when studying stress responses

🔎 Key findings:
→ Glucose availability amplifies cortisol responses to acute stress
→ Effects of sex hormones (progesterone, estradiol) are smaller and less consistent
→ Metabolic state seems to play an important role in shaping stress physiology

Our work explores how metabolic and hormonal states influence individual differences in cortisol stress responses

📣 Excited to share that my first paper is now published!

📄"Metabolic state shapes cortisol reactivity to acute stress: A systematic review and meta-analysis of metabolic and hormonal modulators"

You can find the full paper here:
doi.org/10.1016/j.yn...

So glad to have been part of the #ECNP2025 conference!

It was a great opportunity to present my poster on how different oral contraceptive states affect physiological and neural stress reactivity, and discuss new perspectives on mental health and well-being 🧠

📣Call for applications

We are recruiting the 2nd cohort of PhD students for the international research training group on women's mental health. If you care about translational pharmacoimaging work integrating hormonal states, please apply #neurojobs
jobs.medizin.uni-tuebingen.de/Job/6598/PhD...

Special thanks to @nbkroemer.bsky.social, @akuehnel.bsky.social, and @mariame.bsky.social for their guidance and contributions to this work! 🙌

Our results highlight the important role of metabolic state in stress reactivity and call for more research into the interplay of metabolic and hormonal systems, especially in understanding sex differences in stress-related disorders.

✨Key findings:

• Glucose administration significantly increased cortisol reactivity compared to control conditions
• Effects of sex hormones were inconsistent and weaker across studies.

➡️ We systematically examined how glucose and sex hormones (estradiol, progesterone) influence cortisol responses to acute stress

Metabolic state shapes cortisol reactivity to acute stress: A systematic review and meta-analysis of metabolic and hormonal modulators Individual variability in cortisol stress responses is shaped by multiple physiological factors. Yet the interaction with metabolic and hormonal states remains poorly understood. Therefore, we conduct...

🔬 New Preprint Alert!
I'm excited to share that my first manuscript is now available as a preprint:

📄 Metabolic State Shapes Cortisol Reactivity to Acute Stress: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Metabolic and Hormonal Modulators

🔗 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Thank you for the introduction! I’m excited to share my upcoming preprint and looking forward to sharing my work on stress and women’s mental health 🧠