ArticleCerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991)2021
Neuroprotective Effects of Motherhood on Brain Function in Late Life: A Resting-State fMRI Study.
Article in Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991), 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers.
What it found
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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.
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Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed, 44 citations in OpenAlex.
- Ectogenesis, gestational preferences and the social coercion argument.Monash bioethics review · 2026Article
- Maternal brain alterations based on neurotransmitter and hormone receptor distributions over six months postpartum.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- Subcortical modulation of the salience network during negative emotional processing in mood and anxiety disorders.Molecular psychiatry · 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
- Preconceptional brain structure and future conception: a prospective brain MRI study among 321 women.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- 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
- Neuroanatomical changes observed over the course of a human pregnancy.Nature neuroscience · 2024Article
- The role of functional emotion circuits in distinct dimensions of psychopathology in youth.Translational psychiatry · 2024Article
- Enduring maternal brain changes and their role in mediating motherhood's impact on well-being.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Greater white matter degeneration and lower structural connectivity in non-amnestic vs. amnestic Alzheimer's disease.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2024Article
- Identifying vulnerable brain networks associated with Alzheimer's disease risk.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2023Article
- The maternal brain is more flexible and responsive at rest: effective connectivity of the parental caregiving network in postpartum mothers.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Matrescence: lifetime impact of motherhood on cognition and the brain.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2023Review
- Interrelated effects of age and parenthood on whole-brain controllability: protective effects of parenthood in mothers.Frontiers in aging neuroscience · 2023Article
- Tree representations of brain structural connectivity via persistent homology.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2023Article
- Socio-Ecological Context of Sleep: Gender Differences and Couples' Relationships as Exemplars.Current psychiatry reports · 2022Review
- Mapping the effects of pregnancy on resting state brain activity, white matter microstructure, neural metabolite concentrations and grey matter architecture.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Diagnosis of Epilepsy with Functional Connectivity in EEG after a Suspected First Seizure.Bioengineering (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Recent Neuroscience Advances in Human Parenting.Advances in neurobiology · 2022Article
- The effect of pregnancy on maternal cognition.Scientific reports · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
The maternal brain undergoes structural and functional plasticity during pregnancy and the postpartum period. Little is known about functional plasticity outside caregiving-specific contexts and whether changes persist across the lifespan. Structural neuroimaging studies suggest that parenthood may confer a protective effect against the aging process; however, it is unknown whether parenthood is associated with functional brain differences in late life. We examined the relationship between resting-state functional connectivity and number of children parented in 220 healthy older females (73.82 ± 3.53 years) and 252 healthy older males (73.95 ± 3.50 years). We compared the patterns of resting-state functional connectivity with 3 different models of age-related functional change to assess whether these effects may be functionally neuroprotective for the aging human parental brain. No relationship between functional connectivity and number of children was obtained for males. For females, we found widespread decreasing functional connectivity with increasing number of children parented, with increased segregation between networks, decreased connectivity between hemispheres, and decreased connectivity between anterior and posterior regions. The patterns of functional connectivity related to the number of children an older woman has parented were in the opposite direction to those usually associated with age-related cognitive decline, suggesting that motherhood may be beneficial for brain function in late life.
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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.