ArticleHuman brain mapping2021
A history of previous childbirths is linked to women's white matter brain age in midlife and older age.
Article in Human brain mapping, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed, 47 citations in OpenAlex.
- Article
- Women's reproductive factors predict local brain aging profiles mapped using deep neural networks.GeroScience · 2026Article
- The effects of a second pregnancy on women's brain structure and function.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Neuroanatomical features reveal accelerated brain age in alcohol use disorder.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Persistent dopamine-dependent remodeling of the neural transcriptome in response to pregnancy and postpartum.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Article
- 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
- Linking menopause-related factors, history of depression, APOE ε4, and proxies of biological aging in the UK biobank cohort.Hormones and behavior · 2024Article
- Longitudinal associations of reproductive factors and exogeneous estrogens with neuroimaging biomarkers of Alzheimer's disease and cerebrovascular disease.Alzheimer's & dementia : the journal of the Alzheimer's Association · 2024Article
- Dissecting unique and common variance across body and brain health indicators using age prediction.Human brain mapping · 2024Article
- Brain asymmetries from mid- to late life and hemispheric brain age.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Association of Cumulative Lifetime Exposure to Female Hormones With Cerebral Small Vessel Disease in Postmenopausal Women in the UK Biobank.Neurology · 2023Article
- Evaluating test-retest reliability and sex-/age-related effects on temporal clustering coefficient of dynamic functional brain networks.Human brain mapping · 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
- Cardiometabolic health across menopausal years is linked to white matter hyperintensities up to a decade later.Frontiers in global women's health · 2023Article
- Mapping the effects of pregnancy on resting state brain activity, white matter microstructure, neural metabolite concentrations and grey matter architecture.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Sex- and age-specific associations between cardiometabolic risk and white matter brain age in the UK Biobank cohort.Human brain mapping · 2022Article
- Mind the gap: Performance metric evaluation in brain-age prediction.Human brain mapping · 2022Article
- Artificial neural networks for non-linear age correction of diffusion metrics in the brain.Frontiers in aging neuroscience · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
9 authors at 2 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Maternal brain adaptations occur in response to pregnancy, but little is known about how parity impacts white matter and white matter ageing trajectories later in life. Utilising global and regional brain age prediction based on multi-shell diffusion-weighted imaging data, we investigated the association between previous childbirths and white matter brain age in 8,895 women in the UK Biobank cohort (age range = 54-81 years). The results showed that number of previous childbirths was negatively associated with white matter brain age, potentially indicating a protective effect of parity on white matter later in life. Both global white matter and grey matter brain age estimates showed unique contributions to the association with previous childbirths, suggesting partly independent processes. Corpus callosum contributed uniquely to the global white matter association with previous childbirths, and showed a stronger relationship relative to several other tracts. While our findings demonstrate a link between reproductive history and brain white matter characteristics later in life, longitudinal studies are required to establish causality and determine how parity may influence women's white matter trajectories across the lifespan.
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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 OpenQuestion graph.