New discovery: The female brain shrinks after pregnancy

Pregnancy causes the mother's brain to shrink, which is the result of a new study published in Nature Neuroscience that partly explains how many women who are pregnant and after having a baby often have reduced memory and ability to concentrate.

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In this new study, Dutch scientist Elseline Hoekzema and Spanish psychologist Erika Barba-Muller said that memory loss in post-pregnant women and the phenomenon of "brain removal" often happens to people at the age of three and the age of youth is related.

New discovery: The female brain shrinks after pregnancy Picture 1

If at a young age, this process plays an important role in health awareness, emotional development and social awareness by helping to regulate nerve connections, supporting the specialization of brain circuits. the set.

In women after pregnancy, the decline in gray matter will reduce social functions, focusing on the ability of others to feel their thoughts and understand their needs.

After scanning the brains of 25 women during pregnancy and postpartum, scientists failed to obtain evidence of a decline in consciousness among pregnant women. But after birth, these women had a poorer performance in oral memory tests.

The reduced part of the brain is mainly in the area of ​​the frontal cortex and temporal lobe, which are thought to be associated with social consciousness and other functions.

Two years later, scientists conducted brain scans for 11 non-pregnant mothers back, who found that the amount of brain reduction had not recovered, except for the brain area of ​​the hippocampus in the anterior brain, the contact memory.

It seems that women who have a stronger relationship with their children have more brain changes.

Kim Yonkers, a psychologist, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Yale University, said that areas of the brain that experienced a decline were associated with functions unrelated to social consciousness, such as seizure control. pain and depression. This means that it is likely that brain volume reduction may help women forget the terrible pain during childbirth.