{"id":42688,"date":"2024-09-17T07:20:44","date_gmt":"2024-09-17T07:20:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kede.com.br\/news\/brain-changes-during-pregnancy-revealed-in-detailed-map\/"},"modified":"2024-09-17T07:20:45","modified_gmt":"2024-09-17T07:20:45","slug":"brain-changes-during-pregnancy-revealed-in-detailed-map","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kede.com.br\/news\/brain-changes-during-pregnancy-revealed-in-detailed-map\/","title":{"rendered":"Brain changes during pregnancy revealed in detailed map"},"content":{"rendered":"


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\" Daniela Cossio<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n
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Pregnancy brain really does exist, according to one of the first detailed maps of human-brain changes before, during and after those crucial nine months.<\/p>\n

Based on 26 scans of one healthy 38-year-old woman’s brain, scientists found “remarkable things” including changes to regions linked to socialising and emotional processing – some of which were still obvious two years after giving birth.<\/p>\n

Further studies in many more women are now needed to determine the potential impact of these brain changes, they say<\/p>\n

And those insights could improve understanding of the earliest signs of conditions such as postnatal depression and pre-eclampsia.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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“It’s the first detailed map of the human brain across gestation,” Emily Jacobs, study author and neuroscientist, from the University of California, Santa Barbara, says.<\/p>\n

“We’ve never witnessed the brain in a process of metamorphosis like this.<\/p>\n

“We are finally able to observe changes to the brain in real time.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\"ElizabethElizabeth Chrastil<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Neuroscientist Elizabeth Chrastil’s brain was scanned repeatedly during her pregnancy<\/figcaption><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n
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The massive physical changes to the body during pregnancy are well known but much less is understood about how and why the brain changes.<\/p>\n

Many women talk about having “pregnancy brain” or “baby brain”, to describe feeling forgetful, absent-minded or having brain fog.<\/p>\n

Previous studies have focused on brain scans before and soon after pregnancy, rather than throughout.<\/p>\n

The brain studied in the research, published in Nature Neuroscience<\/a>, is that of scientist Elizabeth Chrastil, from University of California, Irvine’s Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory.<\/p>\n

She was planning an IVF (in-vitro fertilisation) pregnancy when the research was being discussed and now has a four-year-old son.<\/p>\n

It is “cool” to study her own brain in detail and compare it with those of women who were not pregnant, Dr Chrastil says.<\/p>\n

“It certainly is a little strange to see your own brain changing like this – but I also know that to start this line of research needed a neuroscientist to do it,” she says.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\"LauraLaura Pritschet<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The study found widespread change in grey-matter volume with each week of pregnancy – darker colours show brain regions most affected<\/figcaption><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n
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In nearly 80% of the regions of Dr Chrastil’s brain, the volume of grey matter – tissue that controls movement, emotions and memory – decreased by about 4%, with only a small rebound after pregnancy.<\/p>\n

But there were increases in white-matter integrity – a measure of the health and quality of connections between brain regions – in the first and second trimesters, which returned to normal levels soon after birth. <\/p>\n

The changes are similar to those during puberty, the researchers say.<\/p>\n

Studies in rodents suggest they could make mothers-to-be more sensitive to smells and prone to grooming and nesting, or homemaking.<\/p>\n

“But humans are way more complicated,” Dr Chrastil says.<\/p>\n

She did not personally experience any “mommy brain” during her pregnancy but was certainly more tired and emotional in the third trimester, she says.<\/p>\n

The next step is to collect detailed brain images from 10 to 20 women and data from a much larger sample at particular timepoints, to capture a wide range of different experiences.<\/p>\n

In this way, Dr Chrastil says, “we can determine whether any of these changes could help predict things like postpartum depression or understand how something like pre-eclampsia could affect the brain”.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n


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Daniela Cossio Pregnancy brain really does exist, according to one of the first detailed maps of human-brain changes before, during and after those crucial nine months. Based on 26 scans of one healthy 38-year-old woman’s brain, scientists found “remarkable things” including changes to regions linked to socialising and emotional processing – some of which were […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":42689,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[64],"tags":[9981,11417,406,9984,1083],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kede.com.br\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42688"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kede.com.br\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kede.com.br\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kede.com.br\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kede.com.br\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42688"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/kede.com.br\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42688\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42690,"href":"https:\/\/kede.com.br\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42688\/revisions\/42690"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kede.com.br\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kede.com.br\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kede.com.br\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kede.com.br\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}