Despite myriad challenges, clinicians see room for progress.
Image credit: Shutterstock/David Tadevosian.
Edited by Marcus E. Raichle, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, and approved September 20, 2019 (received for review June 21, 2019)
Significance
Pregnancy is one of the most dynamic periods in a woman’s life, involving a remarkable potential for brain plasticity that promotes cognitive and emotional adjustments to the newborn. We provide evidence for a relationship between number of childbirths and brain aging in 12,021 middle-aged women, suggesting that potential parity-related brain changes may endure beyond the postpartum period and influence the course of neurobiological aging.
Abstract
Maternal brain adaptations have been found across pregnancy and postpartum, but little is known about the long-term effects of parity on the maternal brain. Using neuroimaging and machine learning, we investigated structural brain characteristics in 12,021 middle-aged women from the UK Biobank, demonstrating that parous women showed less evidence of brain aging compared to their nulliparous peers. The relationship between childbirths and a “younger-looking” brain could not be explained by common genetic variation or relevant confounders. Although prospective longitudinal studies are needed, the results suggest that parity may involve neural changes that could influence women’s brain aging later in life.
Footnotes
- ↵1To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: a.m.g.d.lange{at}psykologi.uio.no.
Author contributions: A.-M.G.d.L., T.K., D.v.d.M., T.M., G.D., O.A.A., and L.T.W. designed research; A.-M.G.d.L., T.K., D.v.d.M., L.M., D.A., and L.T.W. performed research; A.-M.G.d.L., D.v.d.M., and L.M. analyzed data; and A.-M.G.d.L. and L.T.W. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no competing interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1910666116/-/DCSupplemental.
Published under the PNAS license.
Population-based neuroimaging reveals traces of childbirth in the maternal brain
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- Neuroscience
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