ArticleNeuroscience2018
Potential Brain Age Reversal after Pregnancy: Younger Brains at 4-6 Weeks Postpartum.
Article in Neuroscience, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 29 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
29 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- BrainAGE, brain health, and mental disorders: A systematic review.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2024Pooled it
- Factors associated with brain ageing - a systematic review.BMC neurology · 2021Pooled it
- Effects of the experimental administration of oral estrogen on prefrontal functions in healthy young women.Psychopharmacology · 2018Trial
- Early Adulthood Signatures of Motherhood in Brain Aging.Human brain mapping · 2026Article
- Article
- Pregnancy and breastfeeding are associated with less later-life cognitive decline in a longitudinal, prospective cohort.Alzheimer's & dementia : the journal of the Alzheimer's Association · 2026Article
- 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
- A Case for estradiol: younger brains in women with earlier menarche and later menopause.GigaScience · 2025Article
- Age-related behavioral resilience in smartphone touchscreen interaction dynamics.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Investigating the impact of motion in the scanner on brain age predictions.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Cellular and molecular signatures of motherhood in the adult and ageing rat brain.Open biology · 2023Article
- The association between sex hormones and the change in brain-predicted age difference in older women.Clinical endocrinology · 2023Article
- The maternal brain is more flexible and responsive at rest: effective connectivity of the parental caregiving network in postpartum mothers.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Neuroimaging-Based Brain Age Estimation: A Promising Personalized Biomarker in Neuropsychiatry.Journal of personalized medicine · 2022Review
- The expectant brain-pregnancy leads to changes in brain morphology in the early postpartum period.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2022Article
- Brain Sex in Transgender Women Is Shifted towards Gender Identity.Journal of clinical medicine · 2022Article
- Dose-dependent relationship between social drinking and brain aging.Neurobiology of aging · 2022Article
- Long-term association of pregnancy and maternal brain structure: the Rotterdam Study.European journal of epidemiology · 2022Article
- Preliminary evidence for a lower brain age in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2022Article
- Pregnancy, preeclampsia and maternal aging: From epidemiology to functional genomics.Ageing research reviews · 2022Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Pregnancy is accompanied by complex biological adaptations, including extreme hormonal fluctuations. Moreover, changes on the endocrine level are accompanied by changes in cerebral anatomy, such as reductions in brain or gray matter volume. Since declining brain and tissue volumes are characteristic for normal aging, the question arises of whether such pregnancy-induced anatomical effects are permanent or transient. To answer this question, we acquired high-resolution brain image data of 14 healthy women in their mid-twenties to late thirties at two time points: within 1-2 days of childbirth (early postpartum) and at 4-6 weeks after childbirth (late postpartum). At both time points, we estimated the brain ages for each woman using a well-validated machine learning approach based on pattern recognition. Ultimately, this algorithm - designed to identify anatomical correlates of age across the entire brain - reveals a single score for each individual: the BrainAGE index. Comparing the BrainAGE indices between both time points, female brains at late postpartum were estimated to be considerably younger than at early postpartum. On average, that difference was about five years (mean ± SD: 5.4 ± 2.4 years). These findings suggest a substantial restoration/rejuvenation effect after giving birth, which is evident already within the first couple of months.
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Registered trials
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 OpenQuestion graph.