Scientists have analyzed a woman's brain during pregnancy to provide the first detailed map of one during pregnancy.
The research followed just one first-time mother, but it kicks off a major international research project that aims to scan the brains of hundreds of women.
“We wanted to look at the trajectory of brain changes specifically within the window of pregnancy,” Laura Pritschet, the study’s lead author from the University of California, Santa Barbara, said in a statement.
The authors hope that the research could one day provide insights into disorders such as postpartum depression.
How was the brain studied during pregnancy?
The team began following Liz Chrastil, who works at the University of California, Irvine, in the US shortly before she became pregnant through in vitro fertilization (IVF).
During her pregnancy and for two years after she was born, they continued to do MRI brain scans and take blood to observe how her brain changed.
“It’s been a very long journey,” said Chrastil, co-author of the paper published Monday in Nature Neuroscience.
"We did 26 scans before, during and after the pregnancy" and found "some really extraordinary things," she said.
The team found that more than 80 percent of the regions studied had reductions in the volume of gray matter, where thinking occurs.
That's an average of about 4 percent of the brain, almost identical to the reduction that occurs during puberty. While less gray matter may sound bad, the researchers said it likely reflects the fine-tuning of networks of interconnected nerve cells called "neural circuits" to prepare for a new stage of life.
"Previous studies had taken pictures of the brain before and after pregnancy, but we had never seen the brain in the midst of this metamorphosis," said co-author Emily Jacobs of the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Unlike past studies, this one focused on many internal brain regions as well as the cerebral cortex, the outermost layer, said Joseph Lonstein, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at Michigan State University, who was not involved in the research.
It's "a good first step to understanding much more about the brain changes that may be possible in a woman during pregnancy and after birth," he said.
Women's health 'historically ignored'
Animal research has linked certain brain changes to qualities that may be helpful when caring for an infant.
While the new study doesn't address what the changes mean in terms of human behavior, Lonstein noted that it describes changes in brain areas involved in social cognition, or how people interact with others and understand their thoughts and feelings, for example.
Eventually, the researchers hope that scientists can use data from large numbers of women for things like predicting postpartum depression before it happens.
"There's 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 a Gordian knot," Jacobs said.
"It's a byproduct of the fact that biomedical sciences have historically ignored women's health."
The researchers have partners in Spain and are moving forward with the largest maternal brain project, which is supported by the Ann S Bowers Women's Brain Health Initiative and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative./ Euronews
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