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Adult neurogenesis is how the adult brain produces new neurons. The newborn cells divide, migrate to specific brain regions and then mature into neurons. Scientists have observed that prolonged testosterone exposure promotes neurogenesis in the adult brain's hippocampus, a region crucial to memory and learning. However, it remains a mystery whether testosterone must act during specific periods of neural development to improve the survival of these new neurons.

A recent study set out to understand how testosterone helps new brain cells survive in the adult brain; its two main focuses were when testosterone exposure is needed and how long it must last.

To isolate testosterone's effects, the researchers castrated the rats to eliminate their primary source of natural testosterone. They then gave the rats daily injections of either testosterone or sesame oil as a control.

The injections were administered over three different periods: days 1–30, days 1–15 or days 16–30 after an initial injection of bromodeoxyuridine (BrdU), which is a synthetic analog of the nucleoside thymidine that gets absorbed into newly dividing cells and acts as a chemical marker, allowing researchers to track the cells.

They saw that receiving daily testosterone for the full 30 days significantly increased the number of surviving new brain cells across the entire dentate gyrus (a subregion of the hippocampus). Giving testosterone for only 15 days, whether during the early or late phase of cell division, was not enough to boost overall cell survival in the entire region.

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