Pregnancy is full of changes for women. And neurons are not immune to them. What does the latest research say about hormones, the brain, and motherhood?
In the eternal discussion about the existence or not of the maternal instinct, there are contributions from medicine, psychology and philosophy. Recently, a study from the Netherlands seems to confirm that the brain goes through changes with pregnancy to facilitate the care of children, strengthen the bond and facilitate tasks that have to do with parenting.
Elseline Hoekzema, leader of the research published this week in Nature, has been doing science on the brains of pregnant women for more than 10 years. As she herself stated in various statements, we do not have as much information as we would like about the neural modifications that happen in a pregnant woman.
Now, what are these changes in the brain during pregnancy about? Do they fulfill any social or survival function of the species?
Speculation about the results goes beyond biology. Could love for children be programmed into our species? We analyze it.
Research in the Netherlands: what was it about?
Hoekzema’s team had 89 young women from their country who agreed to participate in the long-term research since 2015. All of them were nulliparous, that is, they had no previous births.
After 5 years, in 2020, 40 had had a child. Another 40 who had not been mothers served as a control group for the studies. The remaining 9 abandoned their participation.
The scientists analyzed the women’s brains with MRIs and imaging scans before they conceived, after giving birth in all 40 who had become pregnant and a year after childbirth in 28 of them. The 40 non-pregnant women in this span were also studied to have a benchmark.
In addition to the resonances, intelligence and cognitive performance tests were performed. In pregnant women, hormone levels in the urine were measured regularly.
MRI provides images without emitting radiation, making it safe for breastfeeding women.
The results
This same scientific work team had published a preliminary study in 2017. There they already reported findings that showed a significant change in the gray matter of the brain of women who became pregnant.
Now, several years later, the results are repeated. At both times, MRIs showed a reduction in gray matter after pregnancy. This substance is the accumulation of the bodies of neurons in the central nervous system.
But the reduction does not mean a loss of functions. On the contrary, scientists explain that changes in the brain during pregnancy are the signal that hormones remodel the mother’s nervous system.
A similar modification occurs when a woman goes through adolescence. That is, when hormone levels also oscillate abruptly
We believe that the reduction is due to a process similar to synaptic pruning that takes place during adolescence, when weak synapses are removed to favor more mature and efficient mental processing.
