Consider telling any newly pregnant woman, raising a new being is no easy task. Her hormones spike as her body goes through a major physical shift, and the alterations don't stop there.
Based on a 2016 research released in Nature Neuroscience, women's brains undergo major remodeling during pregnancy, which lasts for at least two years after birth. The study also indicates that this modification may aid women in their transition to parenthood, as reported by Scientific American.
The earlier study was confirmed by the latest. Following a novel research, pregnancy causes significant alterations in the brain, including changes in gray matter and areas involved in self-perception. As stated by the scientists, the results indicate that these brain alterations may increase bonding between mother and infant and may play a part in the identity transformation many women experience as they become new moms.
These findings give light on the influence of motherhood on the human brain and hint at dramatic changes in the structural and functional brain during pregnancy, according to the researchers behind the study, which again was released on Nov. 22 in the journal Nature Communications.
Analyzing the Pregnant Women
Based on the study's researchers at Amsterdam University Medical Center, these alterations may offer adaptive benefits for a mom's gestational and maternal conduct as well as the creation of a new mother-child connection.
In a past analysis of pregnant women from Spain, the same group of researchers discovered that the respondents had decreased gray matter in their brains, which remained up to two years after women gave birth. The researchers built on this work in the new study, undertaken in the Netherlands, by evaluating more brain regions and investigating if the alterations were associated with specific behaviors and markers of the mother-infant attachment.
Researchers tracked 80 Dutch women who weren't pregnant at the beginning of the study and who had never before had a kid. During the research, 40 of the women got pregnant. All of the women got their brains examined at the outset of the research and at different intervals, including immediately after giving birth (and those who got pregnant) and one year afterwards.
The scientists determined that pregnant women decreased gray matter volume after giving birth. Replicating the findings of their prior study implies that these findings are reliable and are found in people from different nations, as stated by the authors.
Gray Matter Reductions
These gray matter reductions aren't always harmful; rather, they may reflect a "fine-tuning" of the brain, which might be useful in caring for a new infant, according to the researchers, in a Live Science report. Remarkably, gray matter loss was associated with so-called nesting activities, which are taken out to prepare for the baby's birth, such as preparing the nursery or arranging the house. The study also discovered that pregnant women had modifications in a brain process developed as the default-mode network, a set of brain areas most engaged when a person is not doing a specific activity.
As per the authors, this network is activated when one mind wanders and is assumed to be implicated in self-reflection, including autobiographical memory, along with social functions like empathy.
However, women with variations in the network's default mode reported a stronger link with their newborn (as judged by a mother-infant bonding survey) and had more joy connecting with their infant than women with minor improvements. Women who had more default-mode network modifications reported fewer "bonding deficits," such as sentiments of resentment or hatred toward the infant.
Furthermore, the brain alterations were connected to assessments of commitment to the fetus: the larger the changes in the task in the default mode network, the more inclined women were to separate the baby from themselves and regard the fetus as a person.
Plausible Culprit of Alterations
The authors theorize that alterations towards the default mode network during pregnancy might affect the psychological component of the self, "making contributions to the transition in a woman's identification and concentration that frequently accompanies new parenthood," the authors emphasized.
Lastly, the researchers looked at what may be causing those brain changes, and the findings pointed to a plausible culprit: hormones. Using urine samples gathered at ten stages throughout the trial, the researchers discovered that women with greater levels of estrogen, specifically during the trimester, had more brain alterations than those who did not have such a significant increase in estrogen.
On the other hand, sleep, stress levels, and the manner of delivery was not associated with brain alterations. Even so, the researchers cannot rule out the potential that other components not examined in the study, such as exercise, diet, and genetic markers, are related to these brain alterations. They have urged further studies to investigate these issues.
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