Pregnant women shed grey matter to help with motherhood, study seen by BBC suggests

Key Highlights

• The greater the changes in the brain, the more likely women were to say they were relating to, and bonding well, with their babies - the team of scientists found. These might be positive changes when it comes to caring for newborns, says Prof Susana Carmona, at the Gregorio Marañón Health Research Institute in Madrid."We find in biology, as in life, sometimes less is more."This could represent the brain "rewiring" or remodelling its architecture to "prime it for motherhood", says Carmona, co-lead of the study along with Prof Oscar Vilarroya."I like to use the metaphor of pruning a tree," she says.
• "Some of the branches are cut to make it grow more efficiently."The brain could be rewiring in a positive way to adapt for motherhood, says Susana CarmonaPregnancy changes many organs in the body - the mum's heart can grow bigger, the capacity of her lungs can increase - and so it makes sense pregnancy can change the brain too, Carmona says. We should not just focus on potential memory deficit, she says.
• "New mums learn a whole set of new skills."Studies of the brain during pregnancy are few and far between - but more research is needed into this pivotal time in women's lives, she adds.'Many types of parents'The mums-to-be in Madrid and Barcelona had five MRI scans each, they also took hormone tests and filled in questionnaires about how their emotions changed during and after their pregnancies. For comparison, the team also scanned the brains of 52 women who had never been pregnant.
• This included 20 women who were partners of pregnant women already involved in the research."We did this to try to start to tease out whether the changes they saw were to do with the biological process of pregnancy or more the process of becoming a mum," Carmona says. There is more to parenting than pregnancy, she added: "You can be many types of parents, and you don't need to be pregnant to be a good one."Dozens of women, most of them pregnant, were studied in Madrid and BarcelonaThe study, published in the journal Nature Communications, was not designed to look directly at the long-held notion of so-called baby brain - the brain fog and memory problems that some women say come with pregnancy.
• Even so, it offers clues that the brain does change structurally. While the pregnant women lost an of average nearly 5% of their grey matter, it then partially returned - although not fully - by six months after giving birth.