SoylentNews

hubie [soylentnews.org] writes:

The female body undergoes dramatic, hormone-driven changes during pregnancy. In a new study [nature.com], 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.

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 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 [nature.com]:

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