Parenthood Shrinks Brains
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The op-ed in popular press:
In a 2022 study, my colleagues and I collaborated with researchers in Spain to gather brain scans of a small number of first-time fathers before and after their babies were born. Our results echoed studies of mothers done by some of the same researchers. In several landmark studies, they found that as women became mothers, their brains lost volume in gray matter, the layer of brain tissue rich with neurons, in regions across the brain, including those responsible for social and emotional processing.
The research publications:
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Magdalena Martínez-García, María Paternina-Die, Sofia I Cardenas, Oscar Vilarroya, Manuel Desco, Susanna Carmona, Darby E Saxbe, "First-time fathers show longitudinal gray matter cortical volume reductions: evidence from two international samples," Cerebral Cortex, Volume 33, Issue 7, 1 April 2023, Pages 4156–4163, https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhac333
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Hoekzema, E., van Steenbergen, H., Straathof, M. et al. "Mapping the effects of pregnancy on resting state brain activity, white matter microstructure, neural metabolite concentrations and grey matter architecture." Nat Commun 13, 6931 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-33884-8
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Interesting. I haven't read the article yet, but the first thing I thought of was lose of sleep, so I did word search in The NYT article, and that does get mentioned. The other thing I'm curious about is whether/when the gray matter reduction is reversed.
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@ShiroKuro said in Parenthood Shrinks Brains:
The other thing I'm curious about is whether/when the gray matter reduction is reversed.
This might take a while, seeing that the brain shrinkage phenomena were only discovered c. 2021-2022. Even if the gray matter is to grow back, it will take time; the ongoing responsibilities of actively rearing young children may continuously suppress gray matter replenishment.
