What happens in the brain during pregnancy? Study explains

Science has already established that the brain is not static; it changes and adapts through our lives in response to life events in a process called neuroplasticity .

Researchers are finding that this is especially true for female brains, which are significantly reshaped during three phases of women’s lives: puberty (just like male adolescent brains), pregnancy and perimenopause.

The three transitions are often the target of jokes in pop culture: the grumpy teenager and risk prone who just wants to be with friends; The future distracted mother that leaves the phone in the refrigerator and can’t remember where she parked the car; and the hormonal middle-aged woman who can’t concentrate and goes into spontaneous combustion with heat waves.

But far from being laughable, these behavioral stereotypes are external manifestations of major internal changes, many of them linked to the effects of floating hormones on the brain.

Cognitive neuroscientist Laura Pritschet, a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, is fascinated by how female hormones, including estrogen and progesterone, affect the organization and functioning of the brain.

“The reason I chose this field is because I was a neuroscientist undergraduate, interested in brain networks and obsessed how intricate was all in the brain to simply allow us to have a personality or remember things,” Pritschet tells the correspondent chief doctor of CNN Sanjay Gupta, recently, in his podcast “Chasing Life”.

“At the same time, in my personal life, I was surrounded by menopause women who talked about their cognitive complaints and their attention problems,” he says. “I thought we needed to connect these two things and understand it better.”

Pritschet even volunteering as a “guinea pig” during graduate, with his brain scanned and blood collected for 30 days, for two complete reproductive cycles (with and without contraceptive pills), to start answering the question of how daily fluctuations in hormones relate to daily changes in the brain.

Around this time, other researchers were studying what happens in the brain during pregnancy, according to Pritschet, observing the brain before and after pregnancy. They found many changes, but as the studies adopted an instant approach, many questions were unanswered.

“If there is a 3-5% decrease in the total volume of gray matter, when this is happening (during pregnancy) and how is it happening?” Asked Pritschet. “We are losing huge gaps in what we call metamorphosis.”

“We know that the 40 -week gestational window leads to these body adaptations to support fetus development: we have increased plasma volume, change in immune function, metabolic rate, oxygen consumption,” he says. “How is this trajectory throughout pregnancy?”

To find out, Pritschet and his team followed brain changes in a woman, using magnetic resonance imaging and blood collections, from preconception and fertility treatment to two years after delivery. His findings were published in the journal Nature Neuroscience in September.

“We saw this reduction in the volume of gray matter practically throughout the brain,” explains Pritschet. “We saw an increase in the microstructure of white matter and the size of the ventricles” – the brain is composed of gray and white matter. Gray matter is where most of the brain’s thinking and processing occurs. White matter helps connect the different areas of the brain, allowing them to communicate with each other.

“The inflection point was birth,” says Pritschet. “We have seen that these reductions persisted in postpartum, with slight recovery, meaning that certain areas of the brain showed this increase in the volume of gray matter at the beginning of the postpartum. Others no.”

Pritschet explains that this “choreographed dance between the main characteristics of our brain” is, in one respect, a physical adaptation to increased blood flow and swelling that accompanies pregnancy.

In addition, changes can also be a preparation for the next stage: parenting.

“It’s a thin adjustment of the circuits,” he explains “We know that pregnancy is the period that precedes a moment of life when there is a lot of necessary behavioral adaptation, as well as new cognitive demands and a new cognitive load,” says Pritschet.

“And so, the idea is that there is this pruning or this delicate reconnection to make certain networks or communication in the brain more efficient to meet the demands that will arise.”

This theory is supported by previous work. “The first fundamental articles that analyzed neuroanatomy in women from preconception to postpartum found that the degree of change in gray matter-this kind of reduction-correlated with various maternal behaviors (such as affective bond). Again, this is all correlation,” he explains.

“This is an area where we need to do much more research, and that needs a lot of context,” he says. “But it can be expected that if there is a thin adjustment in these circuits that support cognitive or behavioral processes, the more thin adjustment it occurs, the better the performance. This is the idea-but it is much more complicated than that.”

The only constant is the change

The body is the external sign of much internal agitation. “Pregnancy is a transformative period in a person’s life, where the body goes through quick physiological adaptations to prepare for maternity,” says Pritschet by email. “But pregnancy not only transforms the body – it also triggers profound changes in the brain and reflects another critical period of brain development.”

She called this remodeling a frequently neglected period of brain development that occurs well during the woman’s adulthood.

To what extent should women be alarmed?

Less gray mass may not seem very positive, but it happens for a reason.

“Contrary to what you might think, these reductions are not bad and are actually expected,” says Pritschet, noting that some of the losses are eventually recovered. “This change may indicate a” thin adjustment “of brain circuits, not different from what happens to all young adults when they go through puberty and their brain becomes more specialized.”

These changes can also be a response to the high physiological demands of pregnancy itself, according to the researcher, “demonstrating how adaptive the brain can be.”

These changes can affect future health and behavior

Mapping of these changes can open doors to understand a number of other neurological and behavioral results, including postpartum depression, headaches, migraines, epilepsy, stroke and parental behavior.

“Neuroanatomic changes that develop during pregnancy have broad implications for understanding vulnerability to mental health disorders … and individual differences in parental behavior,” says Pritschet. This may even provide critical insights on how the brain changes throughout life.

It can even provide a critical view of how the brain changes throughout life, according to the researcher.

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Was this content originally published in what happens in the brain during pregnancy? Study explains on the website CNN Brazil.

Source: CNN Brasil