Pregnancy can cause long-lasting changes at least for two years post-partum in the morphology of a woman's brain and help them adapt to challenges of motherhood such as the ability to interact with the child, researchers have found. The study, which used magnetic resonance imaging on participants, showed that the brains of women who underwent pregnancy demonstrated a symmetrical reduction in the volume of grey matter in the medial frontal and posterior cortex line, as well as in specific sections of, mainly, prefrontal and temporal cortex in pregnant women brain regions associated with social cognition.
According to researchers, no changes in memory or other cognitive functions were observed during the pregnancies and, therefore, they believed that the loss of grey matter does not imply any cognitive deficits, but rather such changes correspond to an adaptive process of functional…
