Pregnancy changes the brain more than previously known, study finds
CTV
Researchers have created one of the first comprehensive maps of how the brain changes throughout pregnancy, substantially improving upon understanding of an understudied field.
Researchers have created one of the first comprehensive maps of how the brain changes throughout pregnancy, substantially improving upon understanding of an understudied field.
Certain brain regions may shrink in size during pregnancy yet improve in connectivity, “with only a few regions of the brain remaining untouched by the transition to motherhood,” according to the study published Monday in the journal Nature Neuroscience.
The findings are based on one healthy 38-year-old woman the authors studied from three weeks before conception to two years after her child’s birth. Dr. Elizabeth R. Chrastil, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, underwent in vitro fertilization. Chrastil conceived the project and wished to use herself as the participant, as has been done in previous research.
There has been “so much about the neurobiology of pregnancy that we don’t understand yet,” said senior study author Dr. Emily Jacobs, associate professor in the department of psychological and brain sciences at UC Santa Barbara, in a news briefing on the study. “And it’s not because women are too complicated. … It’s a byproduct of the fact that the biomedical sciences have historically ignored women’s health. It’s 2024, and this is the first glimpse we have at this fascinating neurobiological transition.”
About 85 per cent of sexually active women who don’t use any birth control can expect to become pregnant within a year, and around 208 million women get pregnant every year.
“The brain is an endocrine organ, and sex hormones are potent neuromodulators, but a lot of that knowledge comes from animal studies,” Jacobs said. Human studies tend to rely on brain imaging and endocrine assessments collected from groups of people at a single point in time.
“But that kind of group averaging approach can’t tell us anything about how the brain is changing day to day or week to week as hormones ebb and flow,” Jacobs added. “My lab here at UC Santa Barbara uses precision imaging methods to understand how the brain responds to major neuroendocrine transitions like the circadian cycle, the menstrual cycle, menopause and now, in this paper, one of the largest neuroendocrine transitions that a human can experience — which is pregnancy.”
