Women may actually become more forgetful and display lower cognitive abilities while they are pregnant than they otherwise normally would, a new study shows.
Professor Linda Byrne talks about a phenomenon known as “baby brain” in a Monday podcast published in the Medical Journal of Australia, explaining that pregnancy affects several cognitive areas of the brain. The podcast looks at a new study pulling data from 20 separate reports on the relationship between pregnancy and brain changes, assessing the cognitive abilities of 709 pregnant women and 521 non-pregnant women.
The study specifically explores how pregnancy affects memory and other functions of the brain as well as how length of pregnancy may affect those functions according to Medical Xpress, the medical research company that conducted the study.
Compared to those who were not pregnant, pregnant women performed worse on cognitive tasks including decision-making, attention span and planning according to the study’s results. These functions decreased to their lowest level during the third trimester of pregnancy. Researchers used various methods including digit lists tests to evaluate their subjects.
Pregnant women performed worse than non-pregnant women, however, their performances still fell within the normal range of cognitive ability.
A 2016 study also shows that pregnant women experience reductions in areas of the brain responsible for social information processing, and claims the phenomenon could actually be an adaptive mechanism that allows women to prepare for and adapt their brains to motherhood. The study also shows a loss in cognitive function of the hippocampus — responsible for memory function — fully returned to normal within two years of bearing a child.
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