Pregnancy appears to cause some kind of “reorganization” in a mother's brain, according to a new study.
MRI images of a 38-year-old woman during her pregnancy showed that the disease caused widespread remodeling of the brain, according to a proof-of-concept study published Monday in the journal Neuropsychiatry. Nature Neuroscience.
As part of the research, neuroscientist and first-time mother Elisabeth Krustil The women underwent 26 magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans, the first of which was conducted three weeks before they conceived through IVF, and the last two years after giving birth, according to the study.
The brain 2 types The brain is made up of two types of matter: grey and white matter. When researchers looked at Krystil's MRI scans, they saw a decrease in grey matter, the brain's outermost wrinkled layer.
Another change is an increase in white matter, which is found deeper in the brain and is essentially the network of nerve fibers that allows different parts of the brain to communicate with each other.
The researchers noted that while many changes return to baseline after birth, some changes, such as cortical volume and thickness, remain altered for several years after birth.
Scientists have previously imaged women's brains before and after pregnancy, providing the strongest evidence yet that the human brain undergoes neurological changes during pregnancy, said Laura Pritchett, a postdoctoral research fellow in psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine and lead author of the study.
However, pregnancy studies often Ignored The neuroanatomical changes that occur during pregnancy are “virtually unknown” to the scientific community, Pritchett told The Hill.
The newly published findings offer a glimpse into the “profound hormonal and physiological changes” that occur during pregnancy and how they affect the approximately 140 million women who become pregnant worldwide each year.
During pregnancy, the mother's body undergoes many physical changes to support the developing fetus, including an increase in plasma volume, metabolic rate and oxygen use.
Most of these changes are caused by a massive increase in the production of certain hormones, such as estrogen and progesterone, which, as the researchers noticed in their study, also seem to promote a “remodeling” of the central nervous system.
But more research is needed to fully understand how much the brain changes during pregnancy, Pritchett said.
“We hope that this proof-of-concept study will serve as a starting point for further studies conducted in larger and more diverse cohorts of women,” she said in an email, “only then can we begin to establish what the typical extent of neuroanatomical changes to expect during pregnancy and postpartum recovery might be.”
