Episode 7: Mommy Brain: It’s Not Just in Your Head

“Researchers have marked quite particular changes that occur in the brain and that would include reductions in brain structure and brain volume in different regions and it also looks like these reductions that are seen in before to after the pregnancy they go back to normal afterwards and then it looks like there are also some changes during the post-partum period but the specifics are a bit hard to say yet because it is fairly new.” -Ann-Marie de Lange

In this week’s episode of Women’s Health Interrupted, we are joined by Ann-Marie de Lange, to discuss pregnancy and brain health, also referred to as “mommy brain.” De Lange will delve into how pregnancy may have long-lasting impacts on the brain and what processes go on in the brain when you give birth. She will also address what women can do to improve their brain health and address many of these issues when getting pregnant.

Links to resources mentioned in this episode:

• A history of previous childbirths is linked to women’s white matter brain age in midlife and older age
• Women with a history of previous childbirths show less evident white matter brain ageing
• The maternal brain: Region-specific patterns of brain aging are traceable decades after childbirth
• Women’s brain aging: Effects of sex-hormone exposure, pregnancies, and genetic risk for Alzheimer’s disease
• Pregnancy leads to long-lasting changes in human brain structure
• Less can be more: Fine tuning the maternal brain
• Do Pregnancy-Induced Brain Changes Reverse? The Brain of a Mother Six Years after Parturition
• The birthing brain: A lacuna in neuroscience

Guest Biography

Dr. Ann-Marie de Lange, at the University of Oxford, leads the research group Femilab at Lausanne University Hospital and University of Lausanne. In this research group she focuses on using big datasets (e.g the UK Biobank) and machine learning to study brain aging in large-scale population cohorts, with a particular interest in women’s brain health. She also works closely with Klaus Ebmeier (Neurobiology of Ageing) and Lars Westlye(multimodal imaging group at NORMENT), using neuroimaging and genetics to study how female-specific factors relate to women’s brain health in midlife and older age, as well as maternal mental health and brain plasticity during pregnancy and postpartum.