Latest news with #LauraPritschet
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Health
- Yahoo
I'm a neuroscientist. I scanned my own brain 26 times to see how it changed during pregnancy.
For decades, expectant women have talked about having 'mommy brain' or 'pregnancy brain,' a phenomenon where you're more absent-minded than usual during pregnancy and the postpartum period. But despite this being commonly discussed, scientists haven't really studied it. Liz Chrastil, an associate professor of neurobiology and behavior at the UC Irvine Center for the Neurobiology of Learning & Memory, sought to change that. She had her own brain scanned 26 times before, during and after pregnancy to document the physical changes in a way that had never been done before. Chrastil shares with writer Korin Miller the inspiration behind her research, what it was like to be on the other side of science and what she hopes will happen next. I'm a researcher who specializes in learning and memory, and I use magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) regularly in my work. But the tables turned, and I ended up becoming the subject of a study of the human brain during pregnancy when I was trying to conceive. I was inspired by Laura Pritschet, a graduate student working at the University of California, Santa Barbara, under my colleague, Emily Jacobs. Pritschet had recently finished a study on herself on how the menstrual cycle impacts the brain, and it made me think I should do the same during my pregnancy journey in 2019. I went through in vitro fertilization, so I had a great idea of the timing of my pregnancy. All that was left to do was to track myself, and I did — over 26 MRI scans. I'm used to doing MRIs quite a bit, given my field. I know that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says that MRIs are not linked with pregnancy risk and are the imaging techniques of choice when they're needed during pregnancy. MRI uses a magnet, and there are no injections or radiation. There are no known risks, but we looked at studies of people who had done MRIs during pregnancy for medical reasons, and there were no safety concerns. I did want to be cautious about sound, so we put some foam in the machine as an added precaution to muffle the sound the scanner makes. After that, I worked with my collaborators to come up with the protocols that would be needed for the scans. It ended up being that I simply made appointments to be in the MRI scanner and to do blood draws as well. I tried to time the blood draws to happen just before the scans so the data would be gathered as close together as possible. The MRI sessions weren't short. We did about six or seven different scans each time, ultimately taking about 40 minutes each. I did 26 scans overall, which means I spent more than 1,000 minutes in an MRI scanner before, during and after my pregnancy. During each scan, I had to get set up, be positioned well and just try to get comfortable. Later on in my pregnancy, it was more important just to be comfortable. I had to lay still and stay awake for one of the scans, so I would just think about whatever I wanted during that time. We made a point to do that scan first, and it usually was over in 10 minutes. After that, I would just rest or fall asleep during the other scans. I usually slept — I was pregnant, after all. The research on my brain was eventually published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, featuring photos and breakdowns of all of my scans. We saw some noticeable changes to my brain over time. One big standout was in the volume of gray matter in my brain. Gray matter is a type of tissue that's mostly responsible for processing memory, along with sensory perception, speech and decision-making. The gray matter decreased about 4%, and those changes are pretty permanent. In tracking this, we could see a steady decrease and a slight bounce back in volume, but it never really fully returned. I haven't noticed a change in how I think, though. We also looked at white matter, which acts as the 'superhighway' in the brain to form big connections. We think of this as the road information travels on. Here, we found an interesting change where the structural integrity of white matter improved and peaked around the second trimester before returning to baseline after my baby was born. Again, I didn't notice a difference in how I thought or felt during this time. The purpose of the study was to look for changes in the brain during pregnancy. It's 2025, and it's shocking how little we know about some of these things. There were basically no studies on brain changes during pregnancy, so it was up to us to do the research. But we don't know yet what these findings mean. We don't know if these brain changes are good or not. There is some suggestion that these changes are adaptive, morphing the brain on purpose to help with maternal care. But it could also be a trade-off. The body may be saying, 'We've got other things to do here. Sorry, brain!' and shuttling vital resources away from the brain to other areas. So, we really don't know. Now, we need to find out what all of this means. General interest in this area of research has opened up, and there's been a very big response in the research community to our work. We're now working with other people and plan to do another round with a bigger sample of 10 to 15 pregnant women. After that, we'll scan hundreds of pregnant women but with fewer time points. I'm lucky that I had no major issues with postpartum depression, but estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that up to one in eight women do. We're keeping an eye toward postpartum depression with our research and who is most vulnerable. The hope is that we can help to identify how the risks of postpartum depression change during pregnancy along with where, when and how we can help to prevent it. Ultimately, the big thing is that we actually did the study and asked the questions. This is a huge area of research that has been overlooked — and we're actively trying to change that.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Health
- Yahoo
I'm a neuroscientist. I scanned my own brain 26 times to see how it changed during pregnancy.
For decades, expectant women have talked about having 'mommy brain' or 'pregnancy brain,' a phenomenon where you're more absent-minded than usual during pregnancy and the postpartum period. But despite this being commonly discussed, scientists haven't really studied it. Liz Chrastil, an associate professor of neurobiology and behavior at the UC Irvine Center for the Neurobiology of Learning & Memory, sought to change that. She had her own brain scanned 26 times before, during and after pregnancy to document the physical changes in a way that had never been done before. Chrastil shares with writer Korin Miller the inspiration behind her research, what it was like to be on the other side of science and what she hopes will happen next. I'm a researcher who specializes in learning and memory, and I use magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) regularly in my work. But the tables turned, and I ended up becoming the subject of a study of the human brain during pregnancy when I was trying to conceive. I was inspired by Laura Pritschet, a graduate student working at the University of California, Santa Barbara, under my colleague, Emily Jacobs. Pritschet had recently finished a study on herself on how the menstrual cycle impacts the brain, and it made me think I should do the same during my pregnancy journey in 2019. I went through in vitro fertilization, so I had a great idea of the timing of my pregnancy. All that was left to do was to track myself, and I did — over 26 MRI scans. I'm used to doing MRIs quite a bit, given my field. I know that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says that MRIs are not linked with pregnancy risk and are the imaging techniques of choice when they're needed during pregnancy. MRI uses a magnet, and there are no injections or radiation. There are no known risks, but we looked at studies of people who had done MRIs during pregnancy for medical reasons, and there were no safety concerns. I did want to be cautious about sound, so we put some foam in the machine as an added precaution to muffle the sound the scanner makes. After that, I worked with my collaborators to come up with the protocols that would be needed for the scans. It ended up being that I simply made appointments to be in the MRI scanner and to do blood draws as well. I tried to time the blood draws to happen just before the scans so the data would be gathered as close together as possible. The MRI sessions weren't short. We did about six or seven different scans each time, ultimately taking about 40 minutes each. I did 26 scans overall, which means I spent more than 1,000 minutes in an MRI scanner before, during and after my pregnancy. During each scan, I had to get set up, be positioned well and just try to get comfortable. Later on in my pregnancy, it was more important just to be comfortable. I had to lay still and stay awake for one of the scans, so I would just think about whatever I wanted during that time. We made a point to do that scan first, and it usually was over in 10 minutes. After that, I would just rest or fall asleep during the other scans. I usually slept — I was pregnant, after all. The research on my brain was eventually published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, featuring photos and breakdowns of all of my scans. We saw some noticeable changes to my brain over time. One big standout was in the volume of gray matter in my brain. Gray matter is a type of tissue that's mostly responsible for processing memory, along with sensory perception, speech and decision-making. The gray matter decreased about 4%, and those changes are pretty permanent. In tracking this, we could see a steady decrease and a slight bounce back in volume, but it never really fully returned. I haven't noticed a change in how I think, though. We also looked at white matter, which acts as the 'superhighway' in the brain to form big connections. We think of this as the road information travels on. Here, we found an interesting change where the structural integrity of white matter improved and peaked around the second trimester before returning to baseline after my baby was born. Again, I didn't notice a difference in how I thought or felt during this time. The purpose of the study was to look for changes in the brain during pregnancy. It's 2025, and it's shocking how little we know about some of these things. There were basically no studies on brain changes during pregnancy, so it was up to us to do the research. But we don't know yet what these findings mean. We don't know if these brain changes are good or not. There is some suggestion that these changes are adaptive, morphing the brain on purpose to help with maternal care. But it could also be a trade-off. The body may be saying, 'We've got other things to do here. Sorry, brain!' and shuttling vital resources away from the brain to other areas. So, we really don't know. Now, we need to find out what all of this means. General interest in this area of research has opened up, and there's been a very big response in the research community to our work. We're now working with other people and plan to do another round with a bigger sample of 10 to 15 pregnant women. After that, we'll scan hundreds of pregnant women but with fewer time points. I'm lucky that I had no major issues with postpartum depression, but estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that up to one in eight women do. We're keeping an eye toward postpartum depression with our research and who is most vulnerable. The hope is that we can help to identify how the risks of postpartum depression change during pregnancy along with where, when and how we can help to prevent it. Ultimately, the big thing is that we actually did the study and asked the questions. This is a huge area of research that has been overlooked — and we're actively trying to change that.
CTV News
21-05-2025
- Health
- CTV News
‘Baby brain' is real. 3 things to know about what's happening to your brain
Pregnancy is one of the three Ps (puberty, pregnancy and perimenopause), a time when a person's brain undergoes physical changes due to hormones. d3sign//File via CNN Newsource Science has pretty well established that the brain isn't static; it changes and adapts throughout our lives in response to life events in a process called neuroplasticity. Researchers are discovering this is especially true of female brains, which get remodeled significantly during the three Ps: puberty (as do the brains of adolescent males), pregnancy and perimenopause. All three transitions are a frequent butt of pop-culture jokes: the sulky, risk-taking teenager who only wants to be with friends; the scattered mom-to-be who leaves her cell phone in the fridge and can't remember where she parked the car; and the hormonal middle-aged woman who can't focus and spontaneously combusts with hot flashes. But far from being laughable, these behavioral stereotypes are the external manifestations of big internal shifts, many of them linked to the effects of fluctuating hormones on the brain. Cognitive neuroscientist Laura Pritschet, a postdoctoral fellow in the department of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, is fascinated by how female hormones, including estrogen and progesterone, affect the brain's organization and functioning. 'The reason I chose that field is because I was a budding neuroscientist as an undergrad, interested in brain networks and obsessing over how intricate everything was in the brain to simply allow us to have a personality or remember things,' Pritschet told CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta recently, on his podcast Chasing Life. 'At the same time in my personal life, I was surrounded by menopausal women who were talking about their cognitive complaints and their attention issues,' she said. 'I thought we've got to connect these two together and understand this more.' Pritschet even volunteered as a 'guinea pig' during graduate school, having her brain scanned and blood drawn for 30 days, across two complete reproductive cycles (both on and off birth control pills), to begin to answer the question of how the day-to-day fluctuations in hormones relate to the day-to-day changes in the brain. Around this time, other researchers were studying what happens in the brain during pregnancy, Pritschet said, looking at the brain before and after gestation. They found many changes, but because the studies took a snapshot approach, many questions were left unanswered. 'If there's a 3 to 5% decrease in total gray matter volume, when is that occurring (during pregnancy), and how is it occurring?' Pritschet asked. 'We're missing huge gaps in what we call this metamorphosis. 'We know that the 40-week gestational window leads to these body adaptations to support the development of the fetus: We have increased plasma volume, immune function change, metabolic rate, oxygen consumption,' she said. 'What does this trajectory look like over gestation?' To find out, Pritschet and her team tracked the brain changes in one woman, using MRI and blood draws, from pre-conception and fertility treatment throughout her pregnancy to two years postpartum. Their findings were published in the journal Nature Neuroscience in September. 'We saw this reduction in gray matter volume pretty much across the whole brain,' Pritschet explained. 'We saw increased white matter microstructure and ventricle size.' (Quick anatomy lesson: The brain is made up of gray and white matter. Gray matter is where most of the brain's thinking and processing takes place. White matter helps connect the different brain areas, allowing them to communicate with one another.) 'The inflection point was birth,' Pritschet said. 'We saw that those reductions persisted into postpartum, with slight recovery, meaning that certain areas of the brain showed this rise in gray matter volume in early postpartum. Others did not.' Pritschet said this 'choreographed dance between major features of our brain' is in one respect a physical adaptation to the increased blood flow and swelling that comes with pregnancy. Additionally, the changes may also be a preparation for the next stage: parenting. 'It's a fine-tuning of circuits,' she explained. 'We know that pregnancy is the lead-up to this time in your life where there's a lot of behavioral adaptation that has to occur, and new cognitive demands, and a new cognitive load. 'And so the idea here is that there is this pruning or this delicate rewiring to make certain networks or to make communication in the brain more efficient to meet the demands that are going to have to occur,' Pritschet said. This theory is supported by earlier work. 'The first pinnacle papers that came out looking at neuroanatomy in human women from preconception to postpartum found that degree of change in gray matter volume — that sort of reduction — correlated with various … maternal behaviors (such as bonding). Again, that's all correlation,' she said. 'That's an area we need to do a lot more research on, and it needs a lot of context,' she said. 'But you can expect that if there's fine-tuning in these circuits that underlie cognitive or behavioral process, that the more fine-tuning it undergoes, the better performance you're going to have. That's the idea — but it's so much more complicated than that.' What happens to the brain during pregnancy? Pritschet offers these three insights. The only constant is change The body is the outward sign of a lot of inner upheaval. 'Pregnancy is a transformative time in a person's life where the body undergoes rapid physiological adaptations to prepare for motherhood,' Pritschet said via email. 'But pregnancy doesn't just transform the body — it also triggers profound change to the brain and reflects another critical period of brain development.' She called this remodeling an often-overlooked period of brain development that takes place well into a woman's adulthood. How alarmed should women be? Less gray matter may not sound very positive, but it happens for a reason. 'Despite what one might think, these reductions are not a bad thing, and in fact, are to be expected,' Pritschet said, noting that some of the losses are eventually regained. 'This change could indicate a 'fine-tuning' of brain circuits, not unlike what happens to all young adults as they transition through puberty and their brain becomes more specialized.' These changes could also be a response to the high physiological demands of pregnancy itself, she said, 'showcasing just how adaptive the brain can be.' These changes could affect future health and behavior Mapping these changes could open the door to understanding an array of other neurological and behavioral outcomes including postpartum depression, headaches, migraines, epilepsy, stroke and parental behavior. 'The neuroanatomical changes that unfold during (pregnancy) have broad implications for understanding vulnerability to mental health disorders … and individual differences in parental behavior,' said Pritschet. It may even provide critical insight into how the brain changes over a lifespan, she said.
CNN
21-05-2025
- Health
- CNN
3 things to know about brain changes during pregnancy
Editor's note: The podcast Chasing Life With Dr. Sanjay Gupta explores the medical science behind some of life's mysteries big and small. You can listen to episodes here. Science has pretty well established that the brain isn't static; it changes and adapts throughout our lives in response to life events in a process called neuroplasticity. Researchers are discovering this is especially true of female brains, which get remodeled significantly during the three Ps: puberty (as do the brains of adolescent males), pregnancy and perimenopause. All three transitions are a frequent butt of pop-culture jokes: the sulky, risk-taking teenager who only wants to be with friends; the scattered mom-to-be who leaves her cell phone in the fridge and can't remember where she parked the car; and the hormonal middle-aged woman who can't focus and spontaneously combusts with hot flashes. But far from being laughable, these behavioral stereotypes are the external manifestations of big internal shifts, many of them linked to the effects of fluctuating hormones on the brain. Cognitive neuroscientist Laura Pritschet, a postdoctoral fellow in the department of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, is fascinated by how female hormones, including estrogen and progesterone, affect the brain's organization and functioning. 'The reason I chose that field is because I was a budding neuroscientist as an undergrad, interested in brain networks and obsessing over how intricate everything was in the brain to simply allow us to have a personality or remember things,' Pritschet told CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta recently, on his podcast Chasing Life. 'At the same time in my personal life, I was surrounded by menopausal women who were talking about their cognitive complaints and their attention issues,' she said. 'I thought we've got to connect these two together and understand this more.' Pritschet even volunteered as a 'guinea pig' during graduate school, having her brain scanned and blood drawn for 30 days, across two complete reproductive cycles (both on and off birth control pills), to begin to answer the question of how the day-to-day fluctuations in hormones relate to the day-to-day changes in the brain. Around this time, other researchers were studying what happens in the brain during pregnancy, Pritschet said, looking at the brain before and after gestation. They found many changes, but because the studies took a snapshot approach, many questions were left unanswered. 'If there's a 3 to 5% decrease in total gray matter volume, when is that occurring (during pregnancy), and how is it occurring?' Pritschet asked. 'We're missing huge gaps in what we call this metamorphosis. 'We know that the 40-week gestational window leads to these body adaptations to support the development of the fetus: We have increased plasma volume, immune function change, metabolic rate, oxygen consumption,' she said. 'What does this trajectory look like over gestation?' To find out, Pritschet and her team tracked the brain changes in one woman, using MRI and blood draws, from pre-conception and fertility treatment throughout her pregnancy to two years postpartum. Their findings were published in the journal Nature Neuroscience in September. You can listen to the full episode here. 'We saw this reduction in gray matter volume pretty much across the whole brain,' Pritschet explained. 'We saw increased white matter microstructure and ventricle size.' (Quick anatomy lesson: The brain is made up of gray and white matter. Gray matter is where most of the brain's thinking and processing takes place. White matter helps connect the different brain areas, allowing them to communicate with one another.) 'The inflection point was birth,' Pritschet said. 'We saw that those reductions persisted into postpartum, with slight recovery, meaning that certain areas of the brain showed this rise in gray matter volume in early postpartum. Others did not.' Pritschet said this 'choreographed dance between major features of our brain' is in one respect a physical adaptation to the increased blood flow and swelling that comes with pregnancy. Additionally, the changes may also be a preparation for the next stage: parenting. 'It's a fine-tuning of circuits,' she explained. 'We know that pregnancy is the lead-up to this time in your life where there's a lot of behavioral adaptation that has to occur, and new cognitive demands, and a new cognitive load. 'And so the idea here is that there is this pruning or this delicate rewiring to make certain networks or to make communication in the brain more efficient to meet the demands that are going to have to occur,' Pritschet said. This theory is supported by earlier work. 'The first pinnacle papers that came out looking at neuroanatomy in human women from preconception to postpartum found that degree of change in gray matter volume — that sort of reduction — correlated with various … maternal behaviors (such as bonding). Again, that's all correlation,' she said. 'That's an area we need to do a lot more research on, and it needs a lot of context,' she said. 'But you can expect that if there's fine-tuning in these circuits that underlie cognitive or behavioral process, that the more fine-tuning it undergoes, the better performance you're going to have. That's the idea — but it's so much more complicated than that.' What happens to the brain during pregnancy? Pritschet offers these three insights. The only constant is change The body is the outward sign of a lot of inner upheaval. 'Pregnancy is a transformative time in a person's life where the body undergoes rapid physiological adaptations to prepare for motherhood,' Pritschet said via email. 'But pregnancy doesn't just transform the body — it also triggers profound change to the brain and reflects another critical period of brain development.' She called this remodeling an often-overlooked period of brain development that takes place well into a woman's adulthood. How alarmed should women be? Less gray matter may not sound very positive, but it happens for a reason. 'Despite what one might think, these reductions are not a bad thing, and in fact, are to be expected,' Pritschet said, noting that some of the losses are eventually regained. 'This change could indicate a 'fine-tuning' of brain circuits, not unlike what happens to all young adults as they transition through puberty and their brain becomes more specialized.' These changes could also be a response to the high physiological demands of pregnancy itself, she said, 'showcasing just how adaptive the brain can be.' These changes could affect future health and behavior Mapping these changes could open the door to understanding an array of other neurological and behavioral outcomes including postpartum depression, headaches, migraines, epilepsy, stroke and parental behavior. 'The neuroanatomical changes that unfold during (pregnancy) have broad implications for understanding vulnerability to mental health disorders … and individual differences in parental behavior,' said Pritschet. It may even provide critical insight into how the brain changes over a lifespan, she said. We hope these insights help you better understand the brain changes that occur during pregnancy. Listen to the full episode here. And join us next week for a new episode of the Chasing Life podcast. CNN Audio's Lori Galarreta contributed to this report.
CNN
21-05-2025
- Health
- CNN
3 things to know about brain changes during pregnancy
Maternal health Women's healthFacebookTweetLink Follow Editor's note: The podcast Chasing Life With Dr. Sanjay Gupta explores the medical science behind some of life's mysteries big and small. You can listen to episodes here. Science has pretty well established that the brain isn't static; it changes and adapts throughout our lives in response to life events in a process called neuroplasticity. Researchers are discovering this is especially true of female brains, which get remodeled significantly during the three Ps: puberty (as do the brains of adolescent males), pregnancy and perimenopause. All three transitions are a frequent butt of pop-culture jokes: the sulky, risk-taking teenager who only wants to be with friends; the scattered mom-to-be who leaves her cell phone in the fridge and can't remember where she parked the car; and the hormonal middle-aged woman who can't focus and spontaneously combusts with hot flashes. But far from being laughable, these behavioral stereotypes are the external manifestations of big internal shifts, many of them linked to the effects of fluctuating hormones on the brain. Cognitive neuroscientist Laura Pritschet, a postdoctoral fellow in the department of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, is fascinated by how female hormones, including estrogen and progesterone, affect the brain's organization and functioning. 'The reason I chose that field is because I was a budding neuroscientist as an undergrad, interested in brain networks and obsessing over how intricate everything was in the brain to simply allow us to have a personality or remember things,' Pritschet told CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta recently, on his podcast Chasing Life. 'At the same time in my personal life, I was surrounded by menopausal women who were talking about their cognitive complaints and their attention issues,' she said. 'I thought we've got to connect these two together and understand this more.' Pritschet even volunteered as a 'guinea pig' during graduate school, having her brain scanned and blood drawn for 30 days, across two complete reproductive cycles (both on and off birth control pills), to begin to answer the question of how the day-to-day fluctuations in hormones relate to the day-to-day changes in the brain. Around this time, other researchers were studying what happens in the brain during pregnancy, Pritschet said, looking at the brain before and after gestation. They found many changes, but because the studies took a snapshot approach, many questions were left unanswered. 'If there's a 3 to 5% decrease in total gray matter volume, when is that occurring (during pregnancy), and how is it occurring?' Pritschet asked. 'We're missing huge gaps in what we call this metamorphosis. 'We know that the 40-week gestational window leads to these body adaptations to support the development of the fetus: We have increased plasma volume, immune function change, metabolic rate, oxygen consumption,' she said. 'What does this trajectory look like over gestation?' To find out, Pritschet and her team tracked the brain changes in one woman, using MRI and blood draws, from pre-conception and fertility treatment throughout her pregnancy to two years postpartum. Their findings were published in the journal Nature Neuroscience in September. You can listen to the full episode here. 'We saw this reduction in gray matter volume pretty much across the whole brain,' Pritschet explained. 'We saw increased white matter microstructure and ventricle size.' (Quick anatomy lesson: The brain is made up of gray and white matter. Gray matter is where most of the brain's thinking and processing takes place. White matter helps connect the different brain areas, allowing them to communicate with one another.) 'The inflection point was birth,' Pritschet said. 'We saw that those reductions persisted into postpartum, with slight recovery, meaning that certain areas of the brain showed this rise in gray matter volume in early postpartum. Others did not.' Pritschet said this 'choreographed dance between major features of our brain' is in one respect a physical adaptation to the increased blood flow and swelling that comes with pregnancy. Additionally, the changes may also be a preparation for the next stage: parenting. 'It's a fine-tuning of circuits,' she explained. 'We know that pregnancy is the lead-up to this time in your life where there's a lot of behavioral adaptation that has to occur, and new cognitive demands, and a new cognitive load. 'And so the idea here is that there is this pruning or this delicate rewiring to make certain networks or to make communication in the brain more efficient to meet the demands that are going to have to occur,' Pritschet said. This theory is supported by earlier work. 'The first pinnacle papers that came out looking at neuroanatomy in human women from preconception to postpartum found that degree of change in gray matter volume — that sort of reduction — correlated with various … maternal behaviors (such as bonding). Again, that's all correlation,' she said. 'That's an area we need to do a lot more research on, and it needs a lot of context,' she said. 'But you can expect that if there's fine-tuning in these circuits that underlie cognitive or behavioral process, that the more fine-tuning it undergoes, the better performance you're going to have. That's the idea — but it's so much more complicated than that.' What happens to the brain during pregnancy? Pritschet offers these three insights. The only constant is change The body is the outward sign of a lot of inner upheaval. 'Pregnancy is a transformative time in a person's life where the body undergoes rapid physiological adaptations to prepare for motherhood,' Pritschet said via email. 'But pregnancy doesn't just transform the body — it also triggers profound change to the brain and reflects another critical period of brain development.' She called this remodeling an often-overlooked period of brain development that takes place well into a woman's adulthood. How alarmed should women be? Less gray matter may not sound very positive, but it happens for a reason. 'Despite what one might think, these reductions are not a bad thing, and in fact, are to be expected,' Pritschet said, noting that some of the losses are eventually regained. 'This change could indicate a 'fine-tuning' of brain circuits, not unlike what happens to all young adults as they transition through puberty and their brain becomes more specialized.' These changes could also be a response to the high physiological demands of pregnancy itself, she said, 'showcasing just how adaptive the brain can be.' These changes could affect future health and behavior Mapping these changes could open the door to understanding an array of other neurological and behavioral outcomes including postpartum depression, headaches, migraines, epilepsy, stroke and parental behavior. 'The neuroanatomical changes that unfold during (pregnancy) have broad implications for understanding vulnerability to mental health disorders … and individual differences in parental behavior,' said Pritschet. It may even provide critical insight into how the brain changes over a lifespan, she said. We hope these insights help you better understand the brain changes that occur during pregnancy. Listen to the full episode here. And join us next week for a new episode of the Chasing Life podcast. CNN Audio's Lori Galarreta contributed to this report.
