Have you ever heard of baby brain? Do you know what happens to a woman's brain during pregnancy?
The female body undergoes a remarkable transformation in preparation for motherhood. But what exactly goes on from the neck up remains unclear. New research published in Nature Neuroscience, a journal, makes the most headway on the question yet.
One of the paper's authors, Liz Chrastil, a neuroscientist, used her own pregnancy to study how her brain changed.
After analyzing 26 MRI scans taken prior to, during, and following her first pregnancy, Dr. Chrastil and her co-authors discovered that the volume of her brain had shrunk by almost 4%. However, the reductions in the grey matter—the main bodies of nerve cells—and cortical thickness were accompanied by fine-tuning of white matter, which consists mostly of the nerve fibres linking cells together.
According to the study, practically no cerebral region was unaffected during pregnancy. Dr. Chrastil's brain remained altered two years postpartum when the final scan took place.
The study opened the Maternal Brain Project, an international effort to understand the neurology of pregnancy.
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