A woman’s brain shrinks in size during pregnancy and returns to normal within a few months, but this is not necessarily a bad thing, according to research that has documented the neuro-anatomical changes in a woman. before, during and after pregnancy.
This study on the brain of pregnant women, published in the journal Nature Neurology, constitutes the first brain map of a pregnant woman.
Until now, science had described the physiological changes in the woman’s brain during pregnancy but not so much the neuronal ones, Despite the fact that there are about 140 million women in the world who become pregnant every year.
A group of researchers from the Gregorio Marañón General University Hospital in Madrid documented, in a study also published in Nature Neuroscience, that the brain of women experienced anatomical changes during pregnancy based on the analysis of scans of 110 pregnant women.
What areas of a woman’s brain change during pregnancy?
The new research specifies these changes: a general decrease in the volume of gray matter (cell bodies that perform important mental and cognitive functions) and cortical thickness in the ninth week of pregnancy.
The volume reduction affects, above all, the so-called default mode network, a system of interconnected brain areas which are activated when a person is at rest, explained one of the authors, Emily Jacobs, a researcher at the University of California-Santa Barbara, at a press conference.
Instead, scans have shown an increase in white matter (nerve fibers responsible for facilitating communication between brain regions), ventricular volume (crucial in assessing cardiac risk) and cerebrospinal fluid, which acts as a shock absorber that helps protect your brain and spinal cord from sudden impact or injury.
Increased white matter volume improves brain connectivity of the pregnant woman especially between two areas: the temporal and occipital lobes (the first regulates and coordinates speech and the second vision).
Researchers associate these changes with increases in the levels of two hormones: estradiol and progesterone.
Gray matter volume, for example, decreases as production of those two hormones increases during pregnancy, “without it necessarily being a bad thing,” Jacobs stressed.
The researcher explained that some of the observed changes persist in the postpartum period, such as the reduction in cortical volume and thickness that persists up to two years later; and others are reversed two months later.
Postpartum depression
Jacobs and his colleagues suspect that these anatomical changes observed in women may represent a kind of “cortical refinement” for a challenge like pregnancy and childbirth, somewhat similar to what happens during puberty when the brain specializes.
Researchers, however, have been surprised that such high levels of plasticity are still maintained in adulthood.
The research was carried out by analysing, supported by artificial intelligence, 26 magnetic resonance imaging scans and blood tests on a 38-year-old first-time mother from three weeks before conception (four scans), during the three trimesters of pregnancy (15 scans), up to two years after delivery (7 scans) when the testing period ended.
The researchers compared the brain changes observed in this woman with those of eight control individuals.
The data obtained will be freely accessible for future studies to investigate whether these changes in brain anatomy during pregnancy influence postpartum depression, a disease that affects approximately one in five women.
“The more we know about the maternal brain, the better chance we have of preventing and alleviating these types of conditions,” Jacobs said.
This and other studies focused on characterizing brain changes in pregnant women can help us understand, predict, and prevent postpartum mental pathology, among other phenomena; now it is time to evaluate this phenomenon in a larger group of subjects,” said Susana Carmona, principal investigator of the neuromaternal group at the Gregorio Marañón Health Research Institute in a reaction reported by Science Media Center Spain.
(With information from EFE)
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