When a woman becomes pregnant, a series of changes are triggered throughout her body, which prepares to carry the fetus until the moment of giving birth, but a team of Spanish researchers from the Gregorio Marañón University Hospital in Madrid has discovered that They produce anatomical changes in the brain of the future mother from the beginning of pregnancy, and after childbirth the changes occur again. This finding could contribute to preventing and treating conditions such as postpartum depression, which one in five women suffer from.
To carry out the research, its authors compared the brains of 110 women who were in the third trimester of their first pregnancy with that of women who had never become pregnant. They thus verified that the brain of pregnant women was already anatomically very different from that of those who had never conceived before their baby was born. The results have been published in Nature Neuroscience.
In a previous study, these researchers had already shown that the brain anatomy of mothers three months after giving birth was different from what they had before becoming pregnant for the first time. They observed, specifically, that they had experienced changes in a brain network involved in the perception of ‘self’ and ‘social cognition’, a process that in neuroscience is known as the ‘default neural network’, and consists of a system of brain areas that are activated when the mind is at rest and deactivated when executing tasks that require attention.
Changes in the mother’s brain that persist after childbirth
Another finding of the work was that the more the brain was anatomically modified, the better the bond between mother and child. Furthermore, it has shown that the changes persist at least up to six years after childbirth, and that they are anatomically similar to those that occur during adolescence.
Scientists Susana Carmona, María Paternina-Die and Magdalena Martínez, from the Neuromaternal research area of the Gregorio Marañón Hospital, evaluated the 110 participants again one month after delivery and observed that throughout the postpartum period some of the brain changes caused by the pregnancy are reversed, but others are not.
For example, changes that affect the brain networks responsible for attention tend to return to the pre-pregnancy state after childbirth, but those that affect the ‘default neural network’ do not, those seem to persist, suggesting that it is possible that the first pregnancy modifies for life the brain regions involved in the perception of the ‘I’.
79% of pregnant women who participated in the study gave birth by vaginal delivery, 11% by emergency cesarean section and 10% by scheduled cesarean section. The researchers observed that the changes that occur between the third trimester of pregnancy and the first month of postpartum are different depending on the type of delivery.
It is possible that the first pregnancy modifies for life the brain regions involved in the perception of the ‘I’
Women who had a planned cesarean section showed different brain changes than those seen in women who had a vaginal birth or an emergency cesarean section after labor. This suggests that labor, regardless of whether it ends in a cesarean section or vaginal delivery, influences maternal neuroplasticity, although the impact of these changes is still unknown.
In the neuropsychological aspect, the results of the study have shown that the more anxiety the mother has during pregnancy, the worse the birth experience is; that a worse birth experience is associated with greater stress during the postpartum, and that this, in turn, is related to more symptoms of depression and worse bonding with the baby.
The researchers conclude that the processes of pregnancy, childbirth and postpartum entail very different hormonal, immunological and environmental changes and involve different neuroplasticity mechanisms and that it is necessary to continue investigating how each of them differentially models the maternal brain.
