One of the first comprehensive maps of the changes in the human brain before, during, and after those critical nine months has revealed that the pregnancy brain is genuine.
Scientists discovered “remarkable things” based on 26 scans of a healthy 38-year-old woman’s brain, including alterations to areas related to socializing and emotional processing, some of which were still evident two years after giving child.
It is now necessary to conduct many more research on women in order to ascertain the possible effects of these brain alterations, they claim.
Furthermore, those revelations may help us recognize the early warning indicators of illnesses, including pre-eclampsia and postnatal depression.
Emily Jacobs, a neurologist from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and study author, claims that “it’s the first detailed map of the human brain across gestation.”
“We have never seen the brain go through such a dramatic transformation.
“We are finally able to observe changes to the brain in real time.”
Pregnancy causes significant physical changes to the body, which are widely documented, but little is known about how and why the brain changes.
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Many women refer to feeling forgetful, absent-minded, or experiencing brain fog as having “pregnancy brain” or “baby brain.”
Previous research has focused on brain imaging before and immediately after pregnancy, rather than throughout.
The brain of researcher Elizabeth Chrastil, from the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at the University of California, Irvine, was the subject of the study, which was published in Nature Neuroscience.
When the research was being discussed, she was preparing to become pregnant through in-vitro fertilization (IVF), and she is now a mother of a four-year-old boy.
According to Dr. Chrastil, it is “cool” to thoroughly examine her own brain and contrast it with those of women who were not pregnant.
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It’s definitely a bit odd to see these changes in my own brain, but I also recognize that initiating this line of research required a neuroscientist to undertake it,” she says.
The volume of grey matter, or the brain tissue that regulates movement, emotions, and memory, shrank by roughly 4% in nearly 80% of Dr. Chrastil’s brain regions, and there was only a slight increase in volume following pregnancy.
However, there were increases in first and second trimester white-matter integrity, a measure of the strength and quality of connections across different parts of the brain, which quickly recovered to normal levels following delivery.
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The researchers claim that the modifications resemble those that occur throughout puberty.
Studies on rodents indicate that they may increase the olfactory sensitivity and propensity for grooming, nest-building, and homemaking in expectant mothers.
Dr. Chrastil responds, “But humans are way more complicated.”
Although she did not directly suffer from “mommy brain” during her pregnancy, she claims that the third trimester was marked by increased fatigue and emotional exhaustion.
To capture a wide range of diverse experiences, the next stage is to gather comprehensive brain imaging from 10 to 20 women and data from a much larger sample at specific timepoints.
Dr. Chrastil explains, “This approach allows us to determine whether these changes might help predict conditions like postpartum depression or understand how pre-eclampsia could impact the brain.
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