Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by on Monday December 19 2016, @11:45PM   Printer-friendly
from the post-partum-efficiency dept.

Two Soylentils wrote to let us know about research into changes to a woman's brain as a result of pregnancy:

Pregnancy causes visible changes in the female brain, enough to allow computers to determine whether a woman is pregnant by analyzing brain scan images:

Pregnancy reduces grey matter in specific parts of a woman's brain, helping her bond with her baby and prepare for the demands of motherhood. Scans of 25 first-time mums showed these structural brain changes lasted for at least two years after giving birth.

European researchers said the scale of brain changes during pregnancy were akin to those seen during adolescence. But they found no evidence of women's memory deteriorating. Many women have said they feel forgetful and emotional during pregnancy and put it down to "pregnancy" or "baby" brain - and, it seems, with good reason.

[...] This study, from researchers at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona and Leiden University and published in Nature Neuroscience [open, DOI: 10.1038/nn.4458] [DX], looked at the brain scans of women before they became pregnant, soon after they gave birth, and two years later, to see how the brain changed. And they compared these women's brains with those of 19 first-time fathers, 17 men without children and 20 women who had never given birth. The researchers found "substantial" reductions in the volume of grey matter in the brains of first-time mothers. The grey matter changes occurred in areas of the brain involved in social interactions used for attributing thoughts and feelings to other people - known as "theory-of-mind" tasks.

Also at The New York Times .

The female body undergoes dramatic, hormone-driven changes during pregnancy. In a new study, researchers have shown that gray matter regions shrink in areas involved with processing and responding to social signals. These changes occurred for women who conceived naturally or via in vitro fertilization. The researchers followed up with the study participants and found that, except for the hippocampus region, the gray matter loss remained true two years after they delivered their children. The changes were so consistent that a computer algorithm could predict with 100% accuracy whether a woman had been pregnant from her MRI scan.

[Continues...]

The researchers could not explain with certainty what the findings mean–they do not have the kind of access to the women's brains that scietists[sic] have to rodents', for instance—but they speculate that the gray matter losses might confer an adaptive advantage, Hoekzema says. She notes that a similar decline in gray matter volume occurs during adolescence, when neural networks are fine-tuned for more efficiency and more specialized functions.

The abstract of the research paper:

Pregnancy involves radical hormone surges and biological adaptations. However, the effects of pregnancy on the human brain are virtually unknown. Here we show, using a prospective ('pre'-'post' pregnancy) study involving first-time mothers and fathers and nulliparous control groups, that pregnancy renders substantial changes in brain structure, primarily reductions in gray matter (GM) volume in regions subserving social cognition. The changes were selective for the mothers and highly consistent, correctly classifying all women as having undergone pregnancy or not in-between sessions. Interestingly, the volume reductions showed a substantial overlap with brain regions responding to the women's babies postpartum. Furthermore, the GM volume changes of pregnancy predicted measures of postpartum maternal attachment, suggestive of an adaptive process serving the transition into motherhood. Another follow-up session showed that the GM reductions endured for at least 2 years post-pregnancy. Our data provide the first evidence that pregnancy confers long-lasting changes in a woman's brain.


Original Submission #1Original Submission #2

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @05:30AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @05:30AM (#443561)

    Semen is a psychoactive drug that causes brain damage! Feminists demand men be destroyed to protect their precious female brains from the damaging effects of semen.