Orchard Edwina R, Chopra Sidhant, Ooi Leon Q R, Chen Pansheng, An Lijun, Jamadar Sharna D, Yeo B T Thomas, Rutherford Helena J V, Holmes Avram J
Yale Child Study Center, Yale School of Medicine, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520.
Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2025 Mar 4;122(9):e2411245122. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2411245122. Epub 2025 Feb 25.
The experience of human parenthood is near ubiquitous and can profoundly alter one's body, mind, and environment. However, we know very little about the long-term neural effects of parenthood for parents themselves, or the implications of pregnancy and caregiving experience on the aging adult brain. Here, we investigate the link between the number of children parented and age on brain function in 19,964 females and 17,607 males from the UK Biobank. In both females and males, parenthood was positively correlated with functional connectivity, such that higher number of children parented was associated with higher connectivity, particularly within the somato/motor network. Critically, the spatial topography of parenthood-linked effects was inversely correlated with the impact of age on functional connectivity across the brain for both females and males, such that the connections that were positively correlated with number of children were negatively correlated with age. This result suggests that a higher number of children is associated with patterns of brain function in the opposite direction to age-related alterations. Overall, these results indicate that the changes accompanying parenthood may confer benefits to brain health across the lifespan, altering aging trajectories, consistent with animal models of parenthood and preliminary findings of "younger-looking" brain structure in human parents. Observing this effect in both females and males implicates the caregiving environment, rather than pregnancy alone, and highlights the importance of future work to disentangle the underlying mechanisms related to the direct impact of caregiving, the indirect impact of the environment, and the result of covarying sociodemographic factors.
为人父母的经历几乎无处不在，并且会深刻改变一个人的身体、思想和环境。然而，我们对为人父母对父母自身的长期神经影响，或者怀孕和育儿经历对成年大脑衰老的影响知之甚少。在此，我们研究了英国生物银行中19964名女性和17607名男性所育子女数量与年龄对脑功能的关联。在女性和男性中，为人父母与功能连接均呈正相关，即所育子女数量越多，连接性越高，尤其是在躯体/运动网络内。至关重要的是，与为人父母相关的效应的空间拓扑结构与年龄对大脑功能连接的影响在女性和男性中均呈负相关，即与子女数量呈正相关的连接与年龄呈负相关。这一结果表明，子女数量较多与脑功能模式的关联方向与年龄相关变化相反。总体而言，这些结果表明，为人父母所伴随的变化可能会在整个生命周期中对大脑健康有益，改变衰老轨迹，这与为人父母的动物模型以及人类父母中“看起来更年轻”的脑结构的初步研究结果一致。在女性和男性中均观察到这种效应，这意味着育儿环境而非仅仅是怀孕起了作用，并突出了未来工作的重要性，即理清与育儿直接影响、环境间接影响以及社会人口统计学因素共同变化结果相关的潜在机制。
