A new study found evidence that pregnancy causes long-lasting brain changes in women. The first-of-its-kind study shows that a woman's brain size is altered and structure of areas involved in perceiving the feelings and perspectives of others is changed.
Pregnancy Causes Remarkable Changes To The Brain
Researchers scanned the brains of women who had never been pregnant before, and again after they gave birth for the first time. The amazing results show the loss of gray matter in several brain areas involved in a process called social cognition, or the ability to register and consider how other people perceive things.
The changes were very consistent that a computer algorithm could predict with 100% accuracy whether a woman had been pregnant from her MRI scan. The investigators could not explain with certainty as to what the results mean but they speculate that the gray matter losses confer with adaptive advantage.
Lead author, Elseline Hoekzema, a neuroscientist at Leiden University the Netherlands, said: "We certainly don't want to put a message out there along the lines of 'pregnancy makes you lose your brain. Gray matter volume loss can also represent a beneficial process of maturation or specialization."
Gray Matter Pruning Is Not Uniform To All Women
The researchers also found that the level of gray matter pruning is not the same for all women, with some pruning more. These women seemed to bond best with their babies. "The gray matter volume changes of pregnancy significantly predicted the quality of mother-to-infant attachment and the absence of hostility toward their newborns in the postpartum period," the authors said.
Scientists involved in the study say that the changes in the brain specialize in "a mother's ability to recognize the needs of her infant, to recognize social threats or to promote mother-infant bonding." They say that more research is needed, but there is certainly a "plausible hypothesis" to this claim.
