Pregnancy changes nearly everything about an expectant mother’s life. That includes her brain. Pregnancy selectively shrinks gray matter to make a mom’s brain more responsive to her baby, and those changes last for years, scientists report online December 19 in Nature Neuroscience.

“This study, coupled with others, suggests that a woman’s reproductive history can have long-lasting, possibly permanent changes to her brain health,” says neuroscientist Liisa Galea of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, who was not involved in the study.

Researchers performed detailed anatomy scans of the brains of 25 women who wanted to get pregnant with their first child. More scans were performed about two months after the women gave birth. Pregnancy left signatures so strong that researchers could predict whether women had been pregnant based on the changes in their brains.



The women who had carried a child and given birth had less gray matter in certain regions of their brains compared with 20 women who had not been pregnant, 19 first-time fathers and 17 childless men. These changes were still evident two years after pregnancy.

A shrinking brain sounds bad, but “reductions in gray matter are not necessarily a bad thing,” says study coauthor Elseline Hoekzema, a neuroscientist at Leiden University in the Netherlands. A similar reduction happens during adolescence, a refinement that is “essential for a normal cognitive and emotional development,” says Hoekzema, who, along with colleagues, did most of the work at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Following those important teenage years, pregnancy could be thought of almost as a second stage of brain maturing, she says.

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Further experiments suggested that pregnancy sculpts the brains of mothers in a very specific way, making women more responsive to their helpless infants. The regions that shrunk the most — parts of the frontal and temporal cortices as well as the midline — are thought to be involved in taking other people’s mental perspectives. Such selective shrinkage may indicate that these regions become more specialized as a result of pregnancy, an efficiency that may help a new mother better care for a baby.

Brain regions that changed the most also showed large responses to pictures of the women’s infants. What’s more, women whose brains changed the most scored higher on a questionnaire about their attachment to their baby.

First-time fathers showed no such brain changes, a result that suggests the effects on mothers’ brains are not caused by the seismic social upheaval of becoming a parent. “It’s not just having a baby to look after that makes the changes in the brain,” says neuroendocrinologist John Russell of the University of Edinburgh, who didn’t participate in the research.

Instead, the brain changes may be caused by pregnancy hormones such as estrogen and progesterone. “Pregnancy is a time of exposure to massive amounts of hormones that get into the brain,” Russell says. But he points out that because the study didn’t actually study brains during pregnancy, just before and after, “we don’t actually know when this change is coming on.” The extreme hormonal drop that comes during birth may also reshape the brain. </s> An article from KTLA reports pregnancy alters the size and structure of brain regions involved in understanding the thoughts, feelings, beliefs and intentions of others.

According to a study published in Nature Neuroscience, many changes in the brain can last approximately two years after giving birth. Elseline Hoekzema, the co-lead author of the study and a senior brain scientist at Leiden University in the Netherlands, stated that

Hoekzema followed the participants in her study for two years only.

Hoekzema and Erika Barba-Müller, co-lead author and a psychologist, began the study while working together at Autonomous University of Barcelona. They had 25 women who became mothers for the first time and 19 of their male partners undergo MRI brain scans. After completing their pregnancies, these same participants were re-scanned. To compare, 20 women who had never given birth and 17 of their male partners were also scanned at the same time intervals.

The results of the MRI scans revealed that the new mothers showed a loss of gray matter in several brain areas that are associated with social cognition, a form of emotional intelligence. The researchers clarified that while the changes were clear, how to interpret them is not.

“Loss of volume does not necessarily translate to loss of function,” stated Hoekzema, “Sometimes less is more.” She explained further that the loss of gray matter could “represent a fine-tuning of synapses into more efficient neural networks.”

Reduction in gray matter occurred in various regions of the brains of pregnant women, including the prefrontal and temporal cortex. Dr. Kim Yonkers, a professor in psychiatry and obstetrics and gynecology at Yale School of Medicine who was not involved in the new study, suggested that changes in these areas may help women forget the pain or difficulty of pregnancy.

“At this point the results are associative,” said Yonkers. It remains unknown whether changes last beyond two years, she added, and that “we don’t know what happens with multiple pregnancies.” </s> Pregnancy causes “long-lasting” physical changes to a woman’s brain, with significant, but seemingly beneficial, grey matter loss in parts of the crucial organ, a study said.

Some alterations lasted at least two years, they reported, but did not appear to erode memory or other mental processes.

The changes “concern brain areas associated with functions necessary to manage the challenges of motherhood,” study co-author Erika Barba-Muller of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) said in a statement.

The radical hormone surges and physical changes of pregnancy have long been known and studied, but its effects on the brain have been little understood.

The new study, published in Nature Neuroscience, claims to provide the first evidence “that pregnancy confers long-lasting changes in a woman’s brain.”

It compared pre- and post-pregnancy brain scans of 25 first-time mothers. They researchers also looked at the brains of first-time fathers, as well as men and women with no children.

It found “pronounced and long-lasting GM (grey matter) volume reductions in a woman’s brain” in pregnancy, in regions involved in social processes.

In later tests, these same regions lit up most on scans measuring the women’s responses to their babies.

The brain changes were likely an adaptation for motherhood — boosting the ability to recognise the needs and emotional state of a baby and decode potential threats to its health and safety, said the researchers.

Grey matter is found in the brain’s wrinkly outer layer called the cerebral cortex, which houses the processes of learning and memory, motor function, social skills, language and problem solving.

The good news: the researchers “did not observe any changes in memory or other cognitive functions during the pregnancies and therefore believe that the loss of grey matter does not imply any cognitive defects,” said a UAB statement.

The study tested the women up to two years after pregnancy, so it is not clear how long the changes last.

The study pointed to a process called “synaptic pruning” which happens to humans in adolescence to remove rarely-used synapses — connections between brain cells.

This is done to make way, after childhood, for more efficient and specialised synapses and boost the network’s overall efficiency.

A similar process may be at play in pregnancy, the researchers speculated.

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Also, Like us on facebook </s> Pregnancy affects not only a woman's body: It changes parts of her brain too, a new study says.

When researchers compared brain scans of women before and after pregnancy, they spotted some differences in 11 locations. They also found hints that the alterations help women prepare for motherhood. For example, they might help a mother understand the needs of her infant, Elseline Hoekzema, a study author, explained via email.

Hoekzema is a neuroscientist at Leiden University in the Netherlands who began working on the study while at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain. She and colleagues present the results in a paper released Monday by the journal Nature Neuroscience.

It includes data on 25 Spanish women scanned before and after their first pregnancies, along with 20 women who didn't get pregnant during the study. The brain changes in the pregnancy group emerged from comparisons of those two groups.

The results were consistent: A computer program could tell which women had gotten pregnant just by looking at results of the MRI scans.

And the changes, first documented an average of 10 weeks after giving birth, were mostly still present two years after childbirth. That's based on follow-up with 11 study participants.

Further work showed they're a motherhood thing: No brain changes were seen in first-time fathers.

The women showed no declines on tests of memory.

Based on prior research findings, the researchers think the brain changes happened during pregnancy rather than after childbirth.

What's going on? Hoekzema and colleagues think the differences result from sex hormones that flood the brain of a pregnant woman. In the 11 places, the MRI data indicate reductions in volume of the brain's gray matter, but it's not clear what that means. For example, it could reflect loss of brain cells or a pruning of the places where brain cells communicate, called synapses.

Losing some synapses is not necessarily a bad thing. It happens during a hormonal surge in adolescence, producing more specialized and efficient brain circuits. The researchers suspect that could be happening in the pregnant women.

Some study results hint that such upgrades may prepare a woman for motherhood. One analysis linked brain changes to how strongly a woman felt emotionally attached to her infant. And when women viewed pictures of their babies, several brain regions that reacted the most were ones that showed pregnancy-related change.

In addition, the affected brain areas overlapped with circuitry that's involved in figuring out what another person is thinking and feeling. That's a handy ability for a mother tending to an infant.

The idea of synapses being pruned in pregnancy makes a lot of sense, commented Bruce McEwen of Rockefeller University in New York, who studies hormonal effects on the brain but didn't participate in what he called a terrific study.

"The brain is being shaped all the time," he said, and "sex hormones are part of the whole orchestra of processes that change the brain structurally." </s> We’ve all heard of “mom brain,” but now a new study confirms that pregnancy really does alter the organ.

Research published by the Nature Neuroscience journal on Monday looked at brain scans of 25 women before they conceived and after they gave birth to their first child. The study found that there was a loss of gray matter in areas of the brain that help “register and consider how other people perceive things.”

Dr. Jen Ashton, ABC News’ chief women’s health correspondent, says that these alterations in the brain make women better mothers.

“[The study] actually found changes in parts of the structure and size of the brain,” she said. “The theory here is that those changes occurred to help streamline the moms’ brains to prepare for more nurturing, vigilance and teaching. We all know women who say, ‘You know, I wasn't that maternal until I had my own child, and then something clicked,’ or we become multitaskers.”

Watch the video above to learn more.

Researcher Elseline Hoekzema, who was pregnant with her first child during the study and is now expecting her second, said that she definitely noticed the change in herself after giving birth.

“I have to say honestly that at first I was a little intimidated by these changes,” she said. “However, having actually experienced this once, I indeed have the impression that pregnancy and motherhood has changed me, but in subtle ways. I am still me, but a bit of a different version.”

While researchers “suspect that the changes may be permanent,” they maintain that it is “pure speculation at this point.” </s> Pregnancy alters the size and structure of brain regions involved in understanding the thoughts, feelings, beliefs and intentions of others, according to a study published Monday in the journal Nature Neuroscience. Mothers with the greatest degree of overall brain change scored higher than others when tested on the strength of their maternal bonds, the researchers discovered.

Start the conversation, or Read more at WHBF-TV Rock Island. </s> The pigs came straight from the slaughterhouse, where workers had severed their jugular vein and carotid artery and then decapitated them. But starting four hours after the animals’ brains had flat-lined and for the next six hours, the brains became … well, a little less dead, scientists at Yale University reported on Wednesday.

By attaching the brains to a specially constructed device and running souped-up artificial blood through them, the researchers said they were able to restore some of the brains’ molecular and cellular functions, including spontaneous electrical activity in neurons and such signature metabolic functions as consuming oxygen and glucose.

Although the pig brains showed none of the organized, cortex-wide electrical activity associated with consciousness, sensory perception, pain, distress, or other higher-order functions, the experiment challenges long-held medical dogma and is likely to reignite an impassioned debate about what constitutes brain death, especially for the purpose of organ donation. Less controversially, the restoration system, called BrainEx, promises to give neuroscientists a better way to study brain wiring and function.

Scientists not involved in the study, who had heard the lead researcher present preliminary results at closed-door meetings in 2017 and 2018, described it in almost awestruck terms, calling it “incredible,” “very impressive,” and “extremely significant.”

The Yale team “showed that, at least at the cellular and molecular level, things are not as irreversible [after the brain is deprived of blood and oxygen] as we thought,” said neurologist Dr. James Bernat of Dartmouth College. “I think it’s remarkable: They were able to restore some brain activity hours after death and the cessation of [blood] circulation, which was previously thought to cause irreversible damage and loss of function.”

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Like every scientist familiar with the study, Bernat quickly added that “there is a major difference between the restoration of cellular and molecular activity in a brain and the resuscitation of overall brain function, which they were not able to achieve.” Or as Yale neuroscientist Dr. Nenad Sestan, who led the study, told reporters on a conference call, “This is not a living brain. This is a cellularly active brain.”

Still, Andrea Beckel-Mitchener of the National Institute of Mental Health called the technology “a real breakthrough for brain research.” Restoring any cell function “has never been done before” in a large, supposedly dead, mammalian brain, she said.

By keeping cells alive and working, she added, the system promises to let scientists study complex circuit connections “and functions that are lost when specimens are preserved in other ways.” Neither isolated brain cells grown in culture nor slices of post-mortem brain tissue reveal much about the neural circuitry and activity that underlies thinking, for instance.

Further development of BrainEx might one day support “neuroresuscitation,” reversing the damage cause by strokes and other brain injuries. “If the system is found to be safe in a living person, there is the potential for improvements in the recovery of brain function,” Bernat said.

Beyond any eventual scientific or medical applications, however, the work raises profound philosophical questions. In an essay accompanying the paper, published in Nature, three bioethicists wrote that it “throws into question long-standing assumptions about what makes an animal — or a human — alive.”

For their experiment, Sestan and his colleagues obtained some 300 pig heads from an abattoir near Yale’s New Haven, Conn., campus, over nearly 10 years as they worked to optimize BrainEx — the “ex” stands for ex vivo, or “out of the living.” Eventually the team connected 32 pig brains to the system — a Rube Goldberg-esque blur of software, blenders, fluid holders, pumps, heaters, filters, and more, whose function was to mimic pulsating blood flow using a special artificial blood — via the carotid artery four hours after the animals had been killed. They kept the brains connected for six hours and at normal temperatures, not cryogenic ones.

Other brains were hooked up to BrainEx but did not get the perfusion solution, or were not hooked up at all. By comparison, the brains connected to BrainEx and perfused showed “dramatic differences,” Sestan said. Brain cells metabolized oxygen and glucose much like living cells. Neurons fired information-carrying electrical bursts called action potentials both spontaneously and in response to an electrical stimulus, as those in living brains do. Blood vessels dilated in response to drugs that cause that response in living brains. Glia, the brain’s immune cells, revved up a lifelike inflammatory response when provoked. Mitochondria, which supply energy to cells, were intact inside neurons, as was myelin, the fatty sheath that provides insulation to neurons so they can conduct electrical signals.

Overall, many more cells remained alive, the circulatory system worked, and the size, shape, and arrangement of neurons and other cells looked normal compared to brains that didn’t get the BrainEx treatment.

In a model of scientific understatement, the authors write that large mammalian brains have “an underappreciated capacity for restoration of microcirculation and molecular and cellular activity after a prolonged post-mortem interval.” In other words, in some cases a brain’s death may be neither permanent nor irreversible.

“We never imagined we would get to this point, … restoring cells to this level” of functionality, Sestan said. Neurological dogma has long held that brain cells die irreversibly and within minutes after blood stops circulating, as the pigs’ did. “But we were able to restore some cellular and molecular function” after four hours of oxygen loss, he said. “We were really surprised.”

Although he was emphatic that the absence of brain-wide electrical activity meant the pig brains had not regained awareness and therefore could not feel pain or distress, that was not a foregone conclusion. The scientists were concerned enough about that possibility that they were prepared to administer anesthesia to the brains, or drastically cool them, to shut off any such activity.

“That’s the elephant in the room: consciousness,” said philosopher Jonathan Moreno of the University of Pennsylvania, who reviewed the paper for Nature and heard Sestan describe his findings last year at a meeting at the National Institutes of Health, whose BRAIN Initiative partly funded the research. “There is a huge fight in neuroscience about what people mean by consciousness and what criteria should be used. Is this [electrical activity in the dead pig brains] a little piece of consciousness? A small degree of consciousness?”

Complicating the question of whether consciousness can be restored to a dead brain is that the BrainEx fluid included a chemical that suppresses neuronal activity. Without that, might the pig brains have shown the sort of brain-wide electrical activity associated with consciousness? “They might have,” Moreno said. “That has to make you ask, what would be the moral status” of a once-dead but (partly) “restored” brain?

Beyond raising such philosophical and ethical concerns, BrainEx could complicate the already-fraught debate over brain death and organ donation, experts said.

READ MORE: Old brains still make neurons, study finds, offering a possible way to protect against Alzheimer’s

By challenging the assumption that large mammalian brains irretrievably lose neural activity and consciousness within minutes of when blood flow stops, the findings raise “the possibility that researchers could get better at salvaging a person’s brain even after the heart and lungs stop working,” bioethicists Stuart Youngner and Insoo Hyun of Case Western Reserve University wrote in a commentary on the study. If the results hold up, they “could exacerbate tensions between efforts to save the lives of individuals and attempts to obtain organs to donate to others. As the science of brain resuscitation progresses, some efforts to save or restore people’s brains might seem increasingly reasonable — and some decisions to forego such attempts in favor of procuring organs for transplantation might seem less so.”

The meaning of brain death is sufficiently controversial that ethicists, transplant surgeons, other physicians, and emergency responders wrestle with when to abandon efforts to save someone’s life and instead try to save their organs for donation. Most organs for transplant come from people who are declared brain dead. But if BrainEx is improved and shown to work on human brains, people who are declared brain dead could qualify for brain resuscitation, not organ donation.

Asked if the United Network for Organ Sharing, the private group that manages organ donations in the U.S., had any comment on the study, a spokeswoman said, “We do not. This is way removed from organ donation.”

Experts disagreed. The study “makes it even less clear that the brain is actually dead under certain circumstances,” said Dr. Kathleen Fenton, a bioethicist and pediatric heart surgeon in Maryland. “It should inform the discussion surrounding brain death, [since it] shows that some cellular life and function loss that we have all thought was irreversible appears to not be irreversible. That’s important.”

Or as Duke University ethicist Nita Farahany and two co-authors said in another commentary, a line from the 1987 film “The Princess Bride” notes that “there’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive.”

This article is reproduced with permission from STAT. It was first published on April 17, 2019. Find the original story here. </s> You can hear those around you, but you can't speak. You can feel a touch, but you can't touch back. You can see, but you can't move, even to blink your eyes.

That's the life of a completely locked-in patient, someone who has brain function but complete paralysis, which can be caused by stroke, traumatic brain injury, medication overdose or diseases of the circulatory or nervous system, such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (also known as ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease).

It was generally thought that completely locked-in patients were unable to communicate with the outside world -- but a new study has showed otherwise.

An international team of scientists has communicated with completely locked-in patients using a noninvasive brain-computer interface system.

The researchers used the system to decode the patients' thoughts while the patients were asked yes or no questions, according to the study, published in the journal PLOS Biology on Tuesday.

Niels Birbaumer, a researcher at the Wyss Center for Bio and Neuroengineering in Switzerland and lead author of the new study, said he wasn't surprised by the findings. "No surprise, but pleasure," Birbaumer said.

"One patient's family is using it regularly," he said of the new system. "With some training, every caretaker of average intelligence can learn it."

To decode what patients were thinking, the system involved functional near-infrared spectroscopy, a tool that can measure blood flow and oxygenation in the brain, and an electroencephalography (EEG) cap, which can measure electrical activity in the brain.

"Since no other technique allows any communication with these subjects, this can be considered to be an important advance," said Andrew Schwartz, distinguished professor of neurobiology at the University of Pittsburgh who was not involved in the new study.

Four patients -- a 68-year-old woman, a 76-year-old woman, a 61-year-old man and a 24-year-old woman -- who were in completely locked-in states participated in the study.

Over several weeks, the researchers repeatedly asked the patients "yes or no" or "true or false" questions while the patients were connected to the communication system.

As the patients thought about their answers, the researchers analyzed changes in the system's measurements to determine whether the patient was thinking about a yes or no response.

The mental states for yes or no were different due to oxygenation changes, but the system could not decipher specific letters or words.

The researchers first asked the patients to respond to questions or statements with known answers, such as "You were born in Berlin," "Your husband's name is Joachim," "Paris is the capital of Germany" or "Paris is the capital of France."

The patients responded correctly at a rate of about 70%, the researchers found.

Once the researchers determined that the patients were trained on how to respond to the questions, they repeatedly asked open questions with no known answers, such as "Are you happy?"

The researchers found that the patients repeatedly answered quality of life questions with a "yes" response, indicating that they had a positive attitude toward life.

A total of at least 200 known questions and 40 open questions were constructed for the patients with input from family members.

Birbaumer and his colleagues had used only near-infrared spectroscopy to communicate with just one completely locked-in patient in 2014 and published their findings in the journal Neurology. He said the new findings mark about 25 years of research.

The new study was successful in showing a creative approach to establishing some communication with completely locked-in ALS patients, said Dr. Brian Litt, a professor and director of the Penn Center for Neuroengineering and Therapeutics at the University of Pennsylvania.

"Their conclusion is, this could be a promising, minimally invasive technology that you could use," said Litt, who was not involved in the new study.

"I think it's pretty convincing that they could get 'yes or no' answers out of these patients. Now, whether they could get to more sophisticated results, like being able to get language or being able to type, for example, from just your thoughts, that takes more research," he said. "Keep in mind what the goal would be. The goal would be for somebody to think their thoughts and really give you more meaningful communication."

Some researchers have used implantable brain chips or blinking as a way to communicate with locked-in patients, depending on the severity of the patient's locked-in state.

Though some locked-in patients have some control of their eye movements, those who are completely locked-in have lost such control.

One of the earliest-known records of locked-in syndrome appeared in Alexandre Dumas' 1844 novel "The Count of Monte Cristo," in which Noirtier de Villefort suffers a stroke and is unable to move and speak but can control his eyes, exhibiting symptoms of being locked-in (PDF).

Another well-known locked-in case occurred more recently. After French journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby suffered a massive stroke in 1995, he lost the ability to move and speak but could control his eyes, exhibiting a locked-in state. Locked-in syndrome is thought to affect about 1% of stroke victims, although the number could be underestimated.

Before he died in 1997, Bauby authored a memoir about his condition, "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly." He produced the book by blinking to indicate which letters his transcriber should use to write. The memoir, which was turned into a 2007 film, was written with about 200,000 blinks.

At Northeastern University in Boston, students developed a brain-computer communication device in 2014 that allowed a locked-in patient to control an on-screen keyboard with only his eyes in order to type messages.

The patient would blink to select certain letters on the screen and put them into sentences.

"We still regularly get contacts from people all around the world who ask, 'Where can I buy this device?' " said Waleed Meleis, associate professor and associate chairman of the department of electrical and computer engineering at Northeastern University, who advised students. The device is not on the market for sale or use.

In the past few years, more communication systems intended for locked-in patients have emerged, including the brain-computer interface system demonstrated in the new study. Meleis was impressed by the study's thoroughness, he said.

"Usually in computer science, you train a computer to do something using machine learning. But here, they are training a person who cannot communicate to manipulate their brain states to produce an answer," Meleis said of the authors of the new study, with which he was not involved.

"They're tackling a problem that is real and very challenging," he said.

Meleis thinks it will still take time before any such communication device may be commonly used with locked-in patients. First, research needs to be replicated and conducted in real-world settings, he said.

"There is a long way to go," he said. "Many of these users are not in hospitals; they are in nursing homes or care facilities. So I think there's another leap to be made to adapt these processes to the lifestyles of a user, but I think we're going to get there."

Additionally, more research is needed to ensure that questions can be asked to patients with a higher accuracy, as in the new study, patients answered known questions with only a 70% correct response rate.

'This would give patients that power'

The extent to which brain-computer technology might be used with completely locked-in patients may depend on how easily and economically the technology can be transformed for real-world settings with everyday caregivers, said Gerwin Schalk, associate professor at the University of Albany School of Public Health and research scientist at the National Center for Adaptive Neurotechnologies.

"The biggest barriers to widespread use are probably the economics of the substantial cost of developing and maintaining the system, combined with the fact it only really helps very few people, so it's sort of like an orphan drug. ... It's very helpful but only to very few people," said Schalk, who was not involved in the new study.

"There are also important ethical implications," he added. For instance, doctors might recommend that a patient's life support be terminated, but then a brain-computer interface might allow that patient to communicate that he or she still wants to live. What should happen next?

Such brain-computer interfaces can put the power to make decisions about their own care back into patients' control, said Dr. Karunesh Ganguly, associate professor of neurology at the University of California, San Francisco and a staff neurologist at the San Francisco Veterans Affair Medical Center.

"It certainly allows the possibility for this noninvasive communication to have important implications for these types of patients' care," Ganguly said of the new study, with which he was not involved.

"Often, for example, for medical care, you need to be able to gain consent," he said. "This would give patients that power to make choices about their own care." </s> Scientists have pinpointed the cells that cause hair to turn gray and to go bald in mice, according to a new study published in the journal Genes & Development.

Researchers from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center accidentally stumbled upon this explanation for baldness and graying hairs—at least in mouse models—while studying a rare genetic disease that causes tumors to grow on nerves, according to a press release from the center.

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They found that a protein called KROX20 switches on skin cells that become a hair shaft, which then causes cells to produce another protein called stem cell factor. In mice, these two proteins turned out to be important for baldness and graying. When researchers deleted the cells that produce KROX20, mice stopped growing hair and eventually went bald; when they deleted the SCF gene, the animals’ hair turned white.

“Although this project was started in an effort to understand how certain kinds of tumors form, we ended up learning why hair turns gray and discovering the identity of the cell that directly gives rise to hair,” said lead researcher Dr. Lu Le, associate professor of dermatology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, in a statement.

More research is needed to understand if the process works similarly in humans, and Le and his colleagues plan to start studying it in people. “With this knowledge, we hope in the future to create a topical compound or to safely deliver the necessary gene to hair follicles to correct these cosmetic problems,” he said.

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Medical research reveals shrinkage in women’s brains as a result of pregnancy. Loss of gray matter in certain regions of the brain may make the brain more efficient and specialized for child-rearing. There is also evidence of links to long-term changes in brain.