A Pregnant Woman's Brain Was Mapped for the First Time — Here's How It Changed

Mar. 15, 2025

Stock image of pregnant person and scans of a woman’s brain pre- and post-pregnancy.Photo:LWA/Getty; Nature Neuroscience

LWA/Getty; Nature Neuroscience

There’s “so much about the neurobiology ofpregnancythat we don’t understand yet,” Dr. Emily Jacobs, associate professor in the department of psychological and brain sciences at UC Santa Barbara and the study’s senior author said, according toCNN.

Scans of the changes that occur in the brain of a pregnant woman.Nature Neuroscience

Nature Neuroscience

Researchers followed a 38-year-old woman three weeks before conception, and two years postpartum, tracking the changes to her brain via a series of 26 MRI scans. Their findings were published in the journalNature, providing one of the first-ever maps of the changes a pregnant woman’s brain can undergo.

And some of these structural changes were still present two years after birth, the study found.

As theCleveland Clinicexplains, “grey matter is the seat of a human’s unique ability to think and reason. The grey matter is the place where the processing of sensation, perception, voluntary movement, learning, speech and cognition takes place.”

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“These behavioral adaptations are critical,” the study says, “to meet the demands of caring for the offspring.”

Stock image of pregnant people.Andrey Popov/Getty

Andrey Popov/Getty

The research cites other studies that say “GMV reductions in areas of the brain [are] important for social cognition and the magnitude of these changes corresponds with increased parental attachment.”

Increased white matter, however, may “facilitate communication between emotional and visual processing hub,” the study says.

“Deeper examination of cellular and systems-level mechanisms will improve our understanding of how pregnancy remodels specific circuits to promote maternal behavior,” the study says.

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The authors say that continuing to extensively track the brain during pregnancy may also help with determining someone’s risk of developing adverse health outcomes like depression, epilepsy, headaches, multiple sclerosis and more.

“Precision mapping of the maternal brain lays the groundwork for a greater understanding of the subtle and sweeping structural, functional, behavioral and clinical changes that unfold across pregnancy.”

source: people.com