Sección de Neuroimagen, Laboratorio de Imagen Médica, Centro de Investigación Biomédica en Red de Salud Mental, Madrid, Spain.
Sección de Neuroimagen, Laboratorio de Imagen Médica, Unidad de Medicina y Cirugía Experimental, Instituto de Investigación Sanitaria Gregorio Marañón, Madrid, Spain.
Hum Brain Mapp. 2019 May;40(7):2143-2152. doi: 10.1002/hbm.24513. Epub 2019 Jan 20.
Mapping the impact of pregnancy on the human brain is essential for understanding the neurobiology of maternal caregiving. Recently, we found that pregnancy leads to a long-lasting reduction in cerebral gray matter volume. However, the morphometric features behind the volumetric reductions remain unexplored. Furthermore, the similarity between these reductions and those occurring during adolescence, another hormonally similar transitional period of life, still needs to be investigated. Here, we used surface-based methods to analyze the longitudinal magnetic resonance imaging data of a group of 25 first-time mothers (before and after pregnancy) and compare them to those of a group of 25 female adolescents (during 2 years of pubertal development). For both first-time mothers and adolescent girls, a monthly rate of volumetric reductions of 0.09 mm was observed. In both cases, these reductions were accompanied by decreases in cortical thickness, surface area, local gyrification index, sulcal depth, and sulcal length, as well as increases in sulcal width. In fact, the changes associated with pregnancy did not differ from those that characterize the transition during adolescence in any of these measures. Our findings are consistent with the notion that the brain morphometric changes associated with pregnancy and adolescence reflect similar hormonally primed biological processes.
绘制怀孕对人脑的影响图谱对于理解母性照护的神经生物学至关重要。最近，我们发现怀孕会导致大脑灰质体积长期减少。然而，体积减少背后的形态特征仍未得到探索。此外，这些减少与青春期（生命中另一个荷尔蒙相似的过渡时期）期间发生的减少之间的相似性仍需要研究。在这里，我们使用基于表面的方法分析了一组 25 名初次生育的母亲（怀孕前后）的纵向磁共振成像数据，并将其与一组 25 名女性青少年（青春期发育的 2 年期间）进行了比较。对于初次生育的母亲和青春期女孩，都观察到每月体积减少 0.09 毫米的速度。在这两种情况下，这些减少伴随着皮质厚度、表面积、局部脑回指数、脑沟深度和脑沟长度的减少，以及脑沟宽度的增加。事实上，与怀孕相关的变化在这些测量中与青春期过渡所特有的变化没有区别。我们的发现与以下观点一致，即与怀孕和青春期相关的大脑形态变化反映了类似的受荷尔蒙启动的生物学过程。
