What: It’s 2024 and we are just getting a comprehensive map of how the brain changes (in significant ways!) during pregnancy. A UC Irvine professor had brain imaging done three weeks before embryo implantation through two years after her child’s birth. They found “decreases in gray matter volume and cortical thickness [that] could point toward an idea that for the maternal brain, ‘it looks like less really may be more,’ Pawluski said. ‘It’s potentially becoming more efficient.’ The increase in white matter microstructure, on the other hand, could mean ‘an increase in the exchange of information and communication between different brain areas.’”

Why it matters: While the practical implications of these brain changes are TBD, the reason why it took this long to get this research isn’t. As Prof. Emily Jacobs, a senior author on the study, put it: “It’s not because women are too complicated. … It’s a byproduct of the fact that the biomedical sciences have historically ignored women’s health. It’s 2024, and this is the first glimpse we have at this fascinating neurobiological transition.”

Source: CNN