Why do many women develop postnatal depression? Brain scans can now help us understand

Pregnancy brain really does exist, according to one of the first detailed maps of human-brain changes before, during and after those crucial nine months.

Based on 26 scans of one healthy 38-year-old woman’s brain, scientists found “remarkable things” including changes to regions linked to socialising and emotional processing — some of which were still obvious two years after giving birth. Further studies in many more women are now needed to determine the potential impact of these brain changes, they say. And those insights could improve understanding of the earliest signs of conditions such as postnatal depression and pre-eclampsia.

“It’s the first detailed map of the human brain across gestation,” Emily Jacobs, study author and neuroscientist, from the University of California, Santa Barbara, says.

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Previous studies have focused on brain scans before and soon after pregnancy, rather than throughout. The brain studied in the research, published in Nature Neuroscience, is that of scientist Elizabeth Chrastil, from [the] University of California, Irvine’s Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory.

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