Do you suffer from baby brain? Scientists reveal condition really DOES exist

Baby brain, the pregnancy-induced fug which many women claim to suffer, does really exist.
Many mums claims that they become more forgetful during pregnancy, oversensitive and less able to focus on logical tasks.

Now new research shows pregnancy leads to changes in the mother’s brain.
Researchers compared the structure of the brain of women before and after their first pregnancy.



The study by scientists at Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) in Spain is the first to show that pregnancy involves long-lasting changes - at least for two years after giving birth - in a woman’s brain.

Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans, the scientists were able to show that the brains of women who have undergone a first pregnancy present “significant reductions” in grey matter in regions associated with social cognition.
The researchers believe that such changes correspond to an adaptive process of functional specialisation towards motherhood.
Co lead author Doctor Elseline Hoekzema, now at Leiden University in Holland, said: “These changes may reflect, at least in part, a mechanism of synaptic pruning, which also takes place in adolescence, where weak synapses are eliminated giving way to more efficient and specialised neural networks.”



Co lead author Doctor Erika Barba said: “These changes concern brain areas associated with functions necessary to manage the challenges of motherhood.”

The researchers found that the areas with grey matter reductions overlapped with brain regions activated during a functional neuroimaging session in which the mothers of the study watched images of their own babies.
To conduct the study, researchers compared MRI images of 25 first-time mums before and after their pregnancy, of 19 male partners, and of a control group formed by 20 women who were not and had never been pregnant and 17 male partners.
They gathered information about the participants over a period of five years and four months.
The results showed 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, pre-frontal and temporal cortex in pregnant women.
Fellow researcher Doctor Susanna Carmona said: “These areas correspond to a great extent with a network associated with processes involved in social cognition and self-focused processing.”

She said the findings determine with great reliability whether any woman from the study had been pregnant depending on the changes in the brain structure.
The researchers were even able to predict the mother’s attachment to her baby in the postpartum period based on the brain changes.
The study took into account variations in both women who had undergone fertility treatment and women who had become pregnant naturally and the reductions in grey matter were practically identical in both groups.
The researchers didn’t observe any changes in memory or other cognitive functions during the pregnancies and therefore believe that the loss of grey matter does not imply any cognitive deficits.



Doctor Oscar Vilarroya added: “The findings point to an adaptive process related to the benefits of better detecting the needs of the child, such as identifying the newborn’s emotional state.
“Moreover, they provide primary clues regarding the neural basis of motherhood, perinatal mental health and brain plasticity in general.”
The findings were published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.