Being pregnant can bring on a bevy of changes — morning sickness, mood swings, unconventional food cravings, the list goes on and on. But until now, scientists haven’t had a good idea of what exactly is changing in the brain during the course of a nine-month pregnancy.
“Previous studies had taken snapshots of the brain before and after pregnancy, but we’ve never witnessed the brain in the midst of this metamorphosis,” said co-author Emily Jacobs of the University of California, Santa Barbara.
“There is so much about the neurobiology of pregnancy that we don’t understand yet, and it’s not because women are too complicated. It’s not because pregnancy is some Gordian knot,” Jacobs said. “It’s a byproduct of the fact that biomedical sciences have historically ignored women’s health.”
For the first time, researchers put together a comprehensive map of a woman’s brain throughout gestation, differing from previous studies which only took snapshots of the brain before and after pregnancy. While analyzing the time in between, the study authors found that nearly every part of the brain was affected, perhaps confirming what many parents already knew to be true.
“It’s been a very long journey,” neuroscientist Elizabeth Chrastil, a co-author of the paper and the subject of the study, told the Associated Press. “We did 26 scans before, during, and after pregnancy” and found “some really remarkable things.” For example, the volume of gray matter decreased, likely representing a “fine-tuning” of brain circuits that allow the organ to prepare for a new phase of life.
Although this study only looked at one person, researchers plan to expand the breadth of their work and scan the brains of hundreds of pregnant women in hopes of gaining a better understanding of postpartum depression and other disorders, at last.
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