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Pregnancy alters woman's brain 'for at least two years'

bbc.com

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Re: Pregnancy alters woman's brain 'for at least two years'

#91

Post by Kroniker »

statictype wrote: post #27
user982 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Otherwise," apparently.

"Called" - implies that it's not actually sexist when in fact it is.

It isn't sexist to study sexual dimorphism. It would be sexist to have a conclusion about the sexes and then cherrypick evidence to support it- but finding evidence and then drawing a conclusion is in no way sexist.

Re: Pregnancy alters woman's brain 'for at least two years'

#92

Post by dsacco »

fs111 wrote: post #90
dsacco wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your lifestyle might change because you have a baby, but (within the scope of this research) pregnancy does not have an effect on the male brain.

please recalibrate your irony detector. Thank you.

Detected; I reject that it's relevant to the discussion, and I'm disappointed it's the top comment. Lifestyle changes aren't relevant to the research presented in the study. What would be relevant is contrary evidence of hormonal changes in males after their spouses undergo pregnancy, or structural alterations in the brain. Of course each parent is impacted by literally taking care of an infant, but what does that have to do with one gender experiencing grey matter reductions?

Re: Pregnancy alters woman's brain 'for at least two years'

#93

Post by [deleted] »

xkcd-sucks wrote: post #47
nommm-nommm wrote: post #36

>And they compared these women's brains with those of 19 first-time fathers, 17 men without children and 20 women who had never given birth. Incomplete control group. They should have included first time adoptive mothers and women who gave their baby up for adoption. Also extremely small sample size. EDIT: It would have also been very relevant to include a sample of lesbian parents of the same child where one parent…

It's a bit surprising that a Nature Neuro paper didn't have more control groups. But on the other hand, it's trickier to get ahold of first time adoptive mothers etc. And on the third hand, there's always somebody requesting increasingly specific control groups and one just has to stop and publish at some point.

[deleted]

Re: Pregnancy alters woman's brain 'for at least two years'

#94

Post by actuallyalys »

nklyn wrote: post #81

Birth control pills boost the same hormones, I wonder if they would have similar affects on the brain.

Pregnancy raises at least estrogen and progesterone to something like ten times the usual menstrual cycle peak, so I doubt the effect size is comparable. Also, I think pregnancy affects a broad range of hormones, not just the handful in birth control.

Re: Pregnancy alters woman's brain 'for at least two years'

#96

Post by kaitai »

It's unfortunate that the link that made the front page here is to the BBC article rather than the NYTimes article [1] on the same study, as the NYTimes article much more clearly addresses a number of the points brought up by commenters here today. The NYTimes article briefly mentions other non-pregnancy related studies on the "pruning" of grey matter. One place to get a bunch of citations for studies on synaptic pruning is in the lit review of [2], since the NYTimes article itself doesn't have a citation for synaptic pruning research in adolescents. However, the NYTimes article does link to [3], an article about spontaneous theory of mind and synaptic density in 18-26 year olds. It looks at a this group of people not by age but by performance on theory of mind tasks, examining the relationship with structural MRI data from the participants. This sheds some light on efficiency and good performance on theory of mind tasks and the neuroanatomy of a person. I think for most HNers taking out thinking about pregnancy and looking at this study first would be useful in understanding the results -- we've all got a lot of preconceived notions about the effects of pregnancy that make it hard to think about the results of the study rationally.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/19/health/pregnancy-brain-cha... [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2475802/ [3] https://scan.oxfordjournals.org/content/10/3/327.abstract

Re: Pregnancy alters woman's brain 'for at least two years'

#97

Post by caminante »

dang wrote: post #78
caminante wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop trolling. And they compared these women's brains with those of 19 first-time fathers, 17 men without children and 20 women who had never given birth.

> Stop trolling Whoa. That's uncivil and a borderline personal attack, which isn't allowed on HN. Please assume good faith when commenting here.

You're right, dang.

I should've said, "The article [clarifies] that," or asked a question.

Re: Pregnancy alters woman's brain 'for at least two years'

#98

Post by akud »

radicalbyte wrote: post #55

Anecdotally I can say it has a large effect on the male brain too. The lack of sleep and time changes you. You get ruthless against time stealers and start seeing 6 hours as a nice long sleep. Full disclosure : I've had about 8hr sleep in 3 days,two sick kids...

People underestimate the effect of extreme sleep deprivation. For the first three months of my daughter's life, we didn't sleep for more than two hours at a time. The effect was profound - I was having auditory hallucinations, was paranoid, etc. It was only after she started sleeping through the night that I understood it was due to the lack of sleep.

Re: Pregnancy alters woman's brain 'for at least two years'

#99

Post by module0000 »

quickben wrote: post #60
radicalbyte wrote: post #55

Anecdotally I can say it has a large effect on the male brain too. The lack of sleep and time changes you. You get ruthless against time stealers and start seeing 6 hours as a nice long sleep. Full disclosure : I've had about 8hr sleep in 3 days,two sick kids...

Yep, 5 month old here, teething. Short term memory is impacted.

Twin parent here...2 years and 2 months into it, and I would really like to know the limit of this "at least 2 years", because that original brain hasn't shown itself one bit, and I'd sure like to have it back.

Re: Pregnancy alters woman's brain 'for at least two years'

#100

Post by digler999 »

dsacco wrote: post #41
mistermann wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW my wife underwent a drastic personality change after giving birth, and I would definitely agree with this being one of the symptoms. But just one data point of course.

I really don't want this to come across as rude, because I don't mean to single you out or invalidate your experience (or your contribution to discussion!). That said, what is the purpose of offering your anecdotal experience if you acknowledge that it is an n=1 datapoint? I understand that it's in good faith to acknowledge that your personal experience doesn't offer any statistical rigor to an interpretation of the…

> what is the purpose of offering your anecdotal experience if you acknowledge that it is an n=1 datapoint?

What is the purpose of using large-n datapoints anymore when the primary motivation of "research" is becoming less about finding meaningful information and more about getting published (in for-profit, paywalled "journals") so you can get more grant money for your institution?

Haven't you seen the articles in the last year or about little scientific research is even reproducible anymore ? You can just repeat your experiment until you get the results you want to see.

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