ArticleTranslational psychiatry2024
Time-sensitive changes in the maternal brain and their influence on mother-child attachment.
Article in Translational psychiatry, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed, 30 citations in OpenAlex.
- Postpartum maternal bonding problems relate to aberrant neural processing of infant emotions: Results of an adapted fMRI emotional GoNoGo task.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- Maternal brain alterations based on neurotransmitter and hormone receptor distributions over six months postpartum.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- The paternal brain: longitudinal insights into structural and functional plasticity and attachment over 24 weeks postpartum.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- GABAergic Neuroactive Steroids and Network States: Relevance to Peripartum Depression.Biological psychiatry · 2026Review
- Article
- Progesterone-associated adjustments in brain structure during menstruation and the periovulatory phase-an MRI study.EBioMedicine · 2026Article
- The effects of a second pregnancy on women's brain structure and function.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Echoes of Pregnancy: Maternal Perception of Phantom Fetal Movements After Childbirth.BJOG : an international journal of obstetrics and gynaecology · 2026Observational
- Psilocybin during the postpartum period induces long-lasting adverse effects in both mothers and offspring.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Protective role of parenthood on age-related brain function in mid- to late-life.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- [Prediction and timely identification of postpartum depression: results of the longitudinal RiPoD study in the context of the literature].Der Nervenarzt · 2025Review
- Hormonal and structural transformations in the caregiver's brain: Examining themes in parental neurobiology.AIMS neuroscience · 2025Review
- Neural emotion regulation during pregnancy: An fMRI study investigating a transdiagnostic mental health factor in healthy first-time pregnant women.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- From Pregnancy to Postpartum: The Dynamic Reorganization of the Maternal Brain.Neuroscience insights · 2025Article
- Longitudinal neuroanatomical increases from early to one-year postpartum.Brain structure & function · 2024Article
- Temporal dissociation between local and global functional adaptations of the maternal brain to childbirth: a longitudinal assessment.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2024Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Pregnancy and the postpartum period are characterized by an increased neuroplasticity in the maternal brain. To explore the dynamics of postpartum changes in gray matter volume (GMV), magnetic resonance imaging was performed on 20 healthy postpartum women immediately after childbirth and at 3-week intervals for 12 postpartum weeks. The control group comprised 20 age-matched nulliparous women. The first 6 postpartum weeks (constituting the subacute postpartum period) are associated with decreasing progesterone levels and a massive restructuring in GMV, affecting the amygdala/hippocampus, the prefrontal/subgenual cortex, and the insula, which approach their sizes in nulliparous women only around weeks 3-6 postpartum. Based on the amygdala volume shortly after delivery, the maternal brain can be reliably distinguished from the nulliparous brain. Even 12 weeks after childbirth, the GMV in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, and the cortical thickness of the subgenual and lateral prefrontal cortices do not reach the pre-pregnancy levels. During this period, a volume decrease is seen in the cerebellum, the thalamus, and the dorsal striatum. A less hostile behavior toward the child at 6-12 weeks postpartum is predicted by the GMV change in the amygdala, the temporal pole, the olfactory gyrus, the anterior cingulate, the thalamus and the cerebellum in the same period. In summary, the restructuring of the maternal brain follows time-dependent trajectories. The fact that the volume changes persist at 12 weeks postpartum indicates that the maternal brain does not fully revert to pre-pregnancy physiology. Postpartum neuroplasticity suggests that these changes may be particularly significant in the regions important for parenting.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.