ICYMI: Multi-Year Study Tracks Pre- and Post-Pregnancy Brain Changes

Experts say pregnancy is an understudied subject in neuroscience.

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Pregnancy is a transformational experience, but researchers still don’t have a firm grasp on how it affects the brain. In a new study, University of California, Irvine, neuroscientist Elizabeth Chrastil used her own pregnancy as an opportunity to help fill some of those knowledge gaps. She underwent precision MRI scans every few weeks which tracked her brain over the course of years, starting just before she conceived via IVF and ending two years following the birth of her child. The research was published Sept. 16, 2024, in Nature Neuroscience.

Those scans documented a host of changes across Chrastil’s brain during and after pregnancy. The paper’s authors noted few regions were “untouched by the transition to motherhood.” Chrastil experienced widespread, lasting decreases in gray matter volume. Researchers believe this process, which mirrors what happens during puberty, fine-tunes neural circuits, the Associated Press reported. By contrast, her white matter microstructural integrity increased during the first and second trimesters but returned to baseline following childbirth, according to the paper. Chrastil’s brain scans were contrasted against scans from eight control participants who were not pregnant.

Big Picture: Experts say pregnancy is an understudied subject in neuroscience. Generally, there’s a dearth of sex-specific research inquiries, too. Of the more than 50,000 human-brain-imaging studies using MRI published since the 1990s, less than 0.5% specifically looked at women’s health, according to Emily G. Jacobs, a University of California, Santa Barbara, neuroscientist who published an article on the subject in 2023. Jacobs co-authored the paper on Chrastil’s pregnancy experience. She and her colleagues are part of an international effort dubbed the Maternal Brain Project, which aims to collect data from more pregnant people and eventually use that information to predict postpartum depression among other applications, according to the Associated Press.

Read More: Scientists show how pregnancy changes the brain in innumerable ways. Associated Press

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About the Author

Bella Isaacs-Thomas

Bella is the Staff Writer and Editor for BrainFacts. She previously worked as a digital science reporter at PBS NewsHour, where she was named a fellow in the 2022-2023 class of the National Science-Health-Environment Reporting Fellowships (SHERF) and earned a 2021 D.C. Science Writers Association Newsbrief Award for writing. She graduated from the University of Michigan with a bachelor's degree in 2018.