According to a study
released on Monday, pregnancy causes “long-lasting” physical changes to a
woman’s brain, with significant, but seemingly beneficial, grey matter loss in
parts of the crucial organ.
Some alterations lasted at least
two years, they reported, but did not appear to erode memory or other mental
processes.
The changes “concern brain areas
associated with functions necessary to manage the challenges of motherhood,”
study co-author Erika Barba-Muller of the Autonomous University of Barcelona
(UAB) said in a statement.
The radical hormone surges and
physical changes of pregnancy have long been known and studied, but its effects
on the brain have been little understood.
The new study, published in
Nature Neuroscience, claims to provide the first evidence “that pregnancy
confers long-lasting changes in a woman’s brain.”
It compared pre- and
post-pregnancy brain scans of 25 first-time mothers. They researchers also
looked at the brains of first-time fathers, as well as men and women with no
children.
It found
“pronounced and long-lasting GM (grey matter) volume reductions in a woman’s
brain” in pregnancy, in regions involved in social processes.
In later tests, these same
regions lit up most on scans measuring the women’s responses to their babies.
The brain changes were likely an
adaptation for motherhood — boosting the ability to recognise the needs and
emotional state of a baby and decode potential threats to its health and
safety, said the researchers.
Grey matter is found in the
brain’s wrinkly outer layer called the cerebral cortex, which houses the processes
of learning and memory, motor function, social skills, language and problem
solving.
The good news: the researchers
“did not observe any changes in memory or other cognitive functions during the
pregnancies and therefore believe that the loss of grey matter does not imply
any cognitive defects,” said a UAB statement.
The study tested the women up to
two years after pregnancy, so it is not clear how long the changes last.
The study pointed to a process
called “synaptic pruning” which happens to humans in adolescence to remove
rarely-used synapses — connections between brain cells.
This is done to make way, after
childhood, for more efficient and specialised synapses and boost the network’s
overall efficiency.
A similar process may be at play
in pregnancy, the researchers speculated.
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