by The mother’s brain undergoes anatomical changes related to neuroplasticity, since pregnancy. A team from the Gregorio Marañón Hospital in Madrid after analyzing the brains of 110 women in the third trimester of their first pregnancy with that of women who had never been pregnant, which confirms that the brains of the future mothers were already anatomically very different before the baby was born.
This study published in ‘Nature Neuroscience‘is derived from another, also published in’Nature Neuroscience‘ in 2017 which demonstrated by first time that the brain anatomy of mothers three months postpartum was different from what it was before they became pregnant for the first time.
The team of Susana Carmona demonstrated that during this period changes were generated in a brain network involved in the perception of the Self and social cognition, called Red by default. It was also considered that the more the brain changed, the better the bond between mother and child.
Carmona’s line of work in the area of Neuromaternal research at the Gregorio Marañón Hospital now delves into this field, demonstrating that the changes persist, at least, until six years postpartum, and are anatomically similar to those that occur during adolescence, reinforcing the idea of matrescence.
In the 70s, the anthropologist Daniel Raphael I coin the term matrescence is a term to describe the physical, emotional and social transformation that a woman experiences when becoming a mother.
«What we have seen is that the brain changes that occur during pregnancy are not the same that are generated at the time of childbirth, nor in the postpartum,” explains Carmona.
Carmona explains that in this latest work we have been able to “know if those changes that we detected in the first study were already present before the woman gave birth and we observed that, indeed, they are present before childbirth and not only affect those regions involved.” with empathy, but it affects almost the entire brain and in many regions.
Furthermore, it has been seen that many of these changes revert during the first month postpartum and others persist. And he highlights that «What happens in a pregnancy than what happens in childbirth and postpartum is very different.».
Anxiety Depression…
In their work, in addition to analyzing how the brain was, symptoms of anxiety, depression, bonding with the baby, and the experience of childbirth were evaluated. In this way, “we saw that the more anxiety “The woman had during pregnancy, her birth experience was worse and she had more symptoms of depression and so on.”
It has also been seen that the worse the birth experience, the more symptoms of depression the mother had later during the postpartum period and the worse her bond with the baby.
In the present study, 79% of pregnant women gave birth by vaginal delivery, 11% by emergency cesarean section, and 10% by scheduled cesarean section. It will be observed that the changes that occur between the third trimester of pregnancy and the first month of postpartum are different depending on the type of delivery. Women who had a planned cesarean section showed different brain changes than those seen in women who had a vaginal birth or an emergency cesarean section after labor. This suggests that labor, regardless of whether it ends in cesarean section or vaginal delivery, influences neuroplasticity maternal, although the scope and meaning of these changes remains to be determined.
In the neuropsychological aspect, it has also been found that the more anxiety the mother has during pregnancy, the worse the birth experience is; that a worse birth experience is associated with greater stress during the postpartum, and this, in turn, is associated with more symptoms of depression and worse bonding with the baby.
Therefore, thanks to this work it has been determined that pregnancy, childbirth and postpartum are processes that, although they usually occur together, entail very different hormonal, immunological and environmental changes.
This study has made it possible to identify that these three processes are also characterized by different neuroplasticity mechanisms, and that it is necessary to evaluate how each of them differentially sculpts the maternal brain.
