Not only does pregnancy change the body, it also changes the way the brain works. Surprising changes have been found in how a mom’s brain changes after becoming a mom. These findings shed new light on one of the least understood aspects of women’s health.
No in-depth studies were done on how pregnancy changes the brains of women.
A surprising finding from the study is that some parts of the brain get smaller during pregnancy, but their connections get stronger. This changes the way the brain works. Almost the whole brain goes through this amazing change as it gets ready to become a mother.
There was less gray matter in more than 80% of the brain, which is sometimes linked to memory and thinking problems. It means that losing gray matter isn’t a bad thing for a woman who is pregnant. One way to compare it to making a sculpture out of a block of marble.
Every year, about 208 million women become pregnant, but we still don’t fully understand how it changes the brain. One of the study’s authors, Dr. Emily Jacobs from UC Santa Barbara, said that women’s health hasn’t been studied enough in the past. The year is 2024, and this is the first look we have at this interesting change in neurobiology, she says.
What changes when a woman is pregnant.
A 38-year-old woman who was healthy and had IVF was studied from three weeks before she got pregnant until two years after she gave birth. The researchers compared 26 MRI scans and blood tests done on pregnant women to those done on eight women who were not pregnant.
By the ninth week of pregnancy, they saw a loss of gray matter volume and thickness in the cerebral cortex, mainly in areas that deal with social thinking. The gray matter in our brains helps us speak, think, and remember things. At the same time, higher levels of hormones were linked to more cerebrospinal fluid and white matter.
She wrote about how she felt during her pregnancy: “I’m 38 years old and went through IVF, which was already a roller coaster.” It felt like my brain wasn’t working right, and I couldn’t think straight. It turned out that my hormones were changing my brain. Not only does pregnancy change your body, but it can also completely change your mind!
“I got pregnant out of the blue, and it’s been crazy,” wrote another reader. It wasn’t just the changes in the body that were expected; strange things have also been happening. The strangest thing is that I can remember things from my childhood that I thought I had forgotten. It feels like my brain is changing, and I’m interested to see what else comes up. I feel like being pregnant is changing me in ways I never thought possible.
For up to two years after birth, changes in the brain can still be seen.
Loss of gray matter was one of these changes that could last up to two years after birth, while others went back to normal in just two months. The pregnant woman had almost three times more gray matter loss than the people in the control group.
The brain may change as a mother, and these findings may help explain that. Scientists think that the brain might work better, and that better communication between brain areas could lead to better care for mothers.
Postpartum depression might be easier to understand now than it was before.
Doctors say that what we don’t know has real effects. Researchers don’t have enough information yet to say for sure if someone will experience postpartum depression or fully understand how preeclampsia, a complication of pregnancy that causes high blood pressure, affects brain health in the long term.
In the 30 years since the first brain imaging study, there have been 50,000. Less than 1% of those studies focus on health issues that are specific to women, like pregnancy. That is why we should think about who scientific knowledge really helps when we talk about it.
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