Sexual interactions with unfamiliar females reduce hippocampal neurogenesis among adult male rats

Might be hard to reproduce this in humans. But we should know whether sex with familiar females increases hippocampal neurogenesis? And what about the females? Inquiring minds want to know these answers. Why would sex have any relation to neurogenesis?
http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0306452216000348?via=sd

Abstract

Recent experiments have shown that sexual interactions prior to cell proliferation cause an increase in neurogenesis in adult male rats. Because adult neurogenesis is critical for some forms of memory, we hypothesized that sexually induced changes in neurogenesis may be involved in mate recognition. Sexually naive adult male rats were either exposed repeatedly to the same sexual partner (familiar group) or to a series of novel sexual partners (unfamiliar group), while control males never engaged in sexual interactions. Ovariectomized female rats were induced into estrus every four days. Males were given two injections of 5-bromo-2′-deoxyuridine (BrdU) (200mg/kg) to label proliferating cells, and the first sexual interactions occurred three days later. Males in the familiar and unfamiliar groups engaged in four, 30-min sexual interactions at four-day intervals, and brain tissue was collected the day after the last sexual interaction. Immunohistochemistry followed by microscopy was used to quantify 5-bromo-2′-deoxyuridine-labeled cells. Sexual interactions with unfamiliar females caused a significant reduction in neurogenesis in the dentate gyrus compared to males that interacted with familiar females and compared to the control group. The familiar group showed no difference in neurogenesis compared to the control group. There were no differences in the amount of sexual behavior (mounts, intromissions, ejaculations, or contact time) that the familiar and unfamiliar groups engaged in, indicating that the differences in neurogenesis were not due to the relative amounts of sexual activity. In a second experiment, we tested whether this effect was unique to sexual interactions by replicating the entire procedure using anestrus females. We found that interactions with unfamiliar anestrus females reduced neurogenesis relative to the other groups, but this effect was not statistically significant. In combination, these results indicate that interactions with unfamiliar females reduce adult neurogenesis and the effect is stronger for sexual interactions than for social interactions.