Samphire Neuroscience

Samphire Neuroscience Building solutions for women with science at the core. 👩‍🔬

11/09/2026

Dr. Emilė Radytė is Harvard BSc (Neuroscience), Oxford MSc (Neuroscience), Oxford PhD (Psychiatry & Engineering). With +4 years working on the front lines in Massachusetts as an EMT, she’s also Co-founder and CEO of Samphire Neuroscience and Integrative Neuroscience Association (NGO).

In the Neuroscience of Endometriosis she discusses the brain-based pain approach of the diagnosis among all these topics:

- Endometriosis: what it is, and why it’s so often missed
- How endometriosis pain works - and why it escalates
- The brain changes in endometriosis
- Stress, hormones and the pain loop
- A whole-body condition: beyond the pelvis
- Brain-based approaches to managing pain

Find the full video in our website or our YouTube channel.

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Anxiety that shows up like clockwork before your period isn’t random, and it isn’t “just PMS.”It builds through the seco...
08/09/2026

Anxiety that shows up like clockwork before your period isn’t random, and it isn’t “just PMS.”

It builds through the second half of your cycle and clears within days of bleeding starting, then returns on roughly the same schedule the next month.

Ko and colleagues (2013) tracked 67 women with PMDD and 75 without across three cycles and found that premenstrual worsening showed up only in the PMDD group.

What’s happening: progesterone breaks down into allopregnanolone, a molecule that normally calms the brain. In PMDD, that calming response can run in reverse (Hantsoo & Epperson, 2020), even though hormone levels themselves aren’t different (Nguyen et al., 2017). It’s not about how much hormone is there. It’s about how the brain responds to it, which is exactly why the prefrontal cortex, the region that helps calm the brain’s threat response, is where a lot of current research is focused (Ironside et al., 2019).

Here’s where we come in. Nettle™ is clinically validated for PMS and period pain, and we’ve just completed a placebo-controlled PMDD trial with Prof Paul Faulkner at Queen Mary University of London. 82.4% of participants reduced their anxiety by more than 30% on the GAD-7 scale. That result is currently in peer review, and it’s the most encouraging signal we have so far. We also designed the trial around something most brain stimulation research has missed: hormones change how the brain responds to stimulation across the cycle (Schloemer et al., 2020; Lee et al., 2018), so we delivered stimulation in the late luteal phase, when premenstrual anxiety actually peaks.

The full picture, including diagnosis and the full range of treatment options, is in our PMDD guide.

05/09/2026

A 2026 study of over 500 women found that more than 1 in 3 who regularly take NSAIDs for period pain get little to no relief from them (Huong et al., 2026). That’s not a willpower problem. It points to something happening in the brain.

Your brain has a built-in system for turning pain down, centered in a region called the periaqueductal gray. A 2026 review of chronic pain research found that this system’s connections can weaken over time, so pain doesn’t get dialed back the way it should (Willgens, 2026).

Research on period pain has found the same thing: during the painful phase, these connections weaken, and the weaker they get, the worse the pain reported (Jin et al., 2024). There’s a hormone layer too. Estrogen levels are linked to the structure of a brain region that processes sensation, and that region’s structure predicts how intense the pain feels (Liu, Xu, Gan et al., 2026).

This helps explain why pain relief doesn’t work the same for everyone. In the 2026 NSAID study, poor sleep, which is linked to a more sensitized nervous system, predicted a worse response to NSAIDs. But the researchers were upfront that this only explained part of the picture, a lot about who responds and who doesn’t is still unexplained.

If standard pain relief has never fully worked for you, that’s not in your head. It may be a real, measurable difference in how your nervous system processes and dampens pain, and it’s exactly why researchers are looking at the brain itself as part of the answer.

04/09/2026

It’s easier to put things into perspective

There are two very different ways to reach the brain from outside the skull, and they get confused for each other consta...
04/09/2026

There are two very different ways to reach the brain from outside the skull, and they get confused for each other constantly.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation, TMS, uses a coil held against the scalp to create pulsed magnetic fields. Those fields are strong enough to directly make neurons in that part of the brain fire. It’s typically delivered in a clinic, under supervision, in sessions of 20 to 40 minutes, often daily for several weeks.

Transcranial direct current stimulation, tDCS, works completely differently. It sends a very weak, steady electrical current through electrodes on the scalp, what we’ll call electrical brain stimulation from here on. It doesn’t force neurons to fire. It shifts how easily they fire in response to everything else already happening in the brain. That signal is weak enough to be self-administered, including at home.

The evidence base for both is real, and both are moving forward. TMS has FDA clearance for major depressive disorder in adults, OCD, and smoking cessation, and in 2024 that clearance extended to adolescent depression as an add-on treatment (Srivastava et al., 2026). In 2025, the FDA cleared the first at-home electrical brain stimulation device for adult depression, the first clearance of its kind in the US, based on a randomized, sham-controlled trial published in Brain Stimulation.

Both have strong safety records. TMS’s most common side effects are scalp discomfort and headache, with a rare seizure risk in certain people. Electrical brain stimulation’s most common side effects are mild tingling, redness, or a headache at the electrode site.

Different signals, different settings, same underlying idea: working with the brain directly. Electrical brain stimulation is the category The Samphire Headband belongs to.

02/09/2026

Spain’s food safety agency, AESAN, published a report on nutrition for women in perimenopause, menopause, and postmenopause. Table 4 of the report covers iron and vitamin C recommendations. It was built entirely on data from male study participants.

CSIC researcher Sonia de Pascual-Teresa, of the AMIT – an association of women working in STEM –, traced the numbers back to their original source. The underlying documents disclosed, clearly, that no female-specific data existed and that the figures were mathematically extrapolated from men’s results by body weight. AESAN’s report left that disclaimer out and presented the numbers as if they applied directly to women over 40.

Sociologist Teresa Samper, of the Universitat de València, called it “an androcentric bias in an area of study of women.” AMIT’s president said the agency’s director never responded to their complaints, and that errors like this persist “if nobody says anything.”

AESAN has said it will add a clarifying note to Table 4 in the first week of September.

This is a nutrition report, not a neuroscience one, but the pattern is one we see constantly in women’s health research: guidance built on male data, then applied to women without saying so. Catching it took researchers going back to the original source, by hand. That shouldn’t be the standard for how women’s health guidance gets checked.

Sources: reporting by elDiario.es.

31/08/2026

A single day of demanding mental work can make the brain behave like it’s suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome.

The nervous system changes were sharper still. The marker of calming, parasympathetic “rest and digest” activity dropped by about 75%. The marker of sympathetic, “fight or flight” balance rose roughly five-fold. Neither shift showed up after the relaxing day, and the more exhausted people felt, the more pronounced the shift toward sympathetic dominance was.

Source: Mizuno et al. Behavioral and Brain Functions 2011

The researchers’ explanation: the prefrontal cortex normally keeps a lid on subcortical circuits that drive the stress response. Sustained cognitive effort may wear down that braking system, so a demanding day of thinking, with no actual danger anywhere, can tip the body into a stress-like state anyway.
The chronic fatigue syndrome comparison is the authors’ own interpretation, not a direct test on people with CFS. This study looked only at healthy volunteers, and with just 10 participants (4 women, 6 men), it’s a small sample. But the pattern they describe, repeated mental exhaustion wearing down the brain’s own brake on the stress response, is worth sitting with, especially for anyone managing chronic fatigue, ME/CFS, or conditions where “just push through it” isn’t harmless advice.

30/08/2026

The researchers define this mental load of motherhood as the cognitive and emotional labor of family life. The planning, the scheduling, the remembering, and the feeling responsible for everyone’s wellbeing, on top of the physical work of caregiving. On days without paid work outside the home, mothers take on roughly two hours more work a day than fathers do, and get far less time for leisure in return. (Callaghan et al., 2024).

Parenting and financial stress, postpartum depression (which affects up to 19.2% of mothers in the first year) and discrimination, single parenting and many other factors can affect the way our brain reacts to the baby’s needs and switch our own emotional wellbeing in a hard way. And can bend that same adaptable brain to being more vulnerable.

The review published in Nature Mental Health is of existing research, not a new experiment, so it synthesizes findings across many separate studies rather than reporting one result. But the pattern it draws together is clear: the mental load of motherhood has a measurable home in the brain.

Boys are diagnosed with ADHD 3 to 16 times more often than girls in childhood. That’s diagnostic overshadowing.Today’s d...
30/08/2026

Boys are diagnosed with ADHD 3 to 16 times more often than girls in childhood. That’s diagnostic overshadowing.

Today’s diagnostic criteria for ADHD were built on research samples that were roughly 80% male (Martin, 2024), so girls’ quieter, inattentive experiences get missed, or masked entirely.

It’s not that women’s ADHD is milder. It’s been harder to see.

25/08/2026

A couple days ago, the NHS added PMDD to its health conditions website. There’s still so much to be done but this opens a new window for women to get diagnosed faster and learn about treatment options sooner.

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