The hormonal and biological changes are more than analyzed, but the consequences of pregnancy on the brain are certainly little known. Now, an investigation led by the Autonomous University of Barcelona and the Hospital del Mar Research Institute (Spain), shows that biological motherhood alters the woman’s brain, improving her abilities to take care of the baby and leaving her intellectual capacities intact. .
Thus, the study compared the structure of the brain of a group of 25 women before and after giving birth to their first child, as well as their partners, and a control group made up of 20 women who were absent and who were not using magnetic resonance imaging. they had not been pregnant and the male partners of 17 of them. The follow-up was carried out for more than 5 years.
Analysis of their brains showed that the first pregnancy reduces the volume of gray matter in the brain in areas involved in social relationships : in the anterior and posterior cortical midline, as well as in specific regions of the prefrontal and temporal cortex of pregnant women .
This is the first research to show that pregnancy produces changes in the brain and that these are maintained for at least two years after delivery. The study was therefore able to determine whether a woman in the sample had been pregnant or not based on changes in the volume of these areas of the brain.
Of course, the reduction in gray matter was exclusive to pregnant women and not to women in the control group. Pregnancy did not involve changes in memory or other intellectual functions , so the researchers believe that the loss of gray matter does not imply any cognitive deficit, rather the opposite, to promote more mature and efficient mental processing.
“The results suggest that this brain plasticity inherent in pregnancy has an evolutionary purpose for the mother to efficiently infer the needs of her baby”, explains Erika Barba-Müller, co-author of the work.
The findings have been published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.
