It is hardly surprising that pregnancy and childbirth, nine months of enormous changes to a woman’s body, also change her brain. And they do, by causing certain parts of it to shrink. Fathers, it might be thought, would be unaffected. But no. There is evidence that their brains shrink, too. A paper just published in Cerebral Cortex by Magdalena Martínez-García of the Gregorio Marañón Health Research Institute in Madrid, and her colleagues, divulges the details.
Emerging evidence points to the transition to parenthood as a critical window for adult neural plasticity. Studying fathers offers a unique opportunity to explore how parenting experience can shape the human brain when pregnancy is not directly experienced. Yet very few studies have examined the neuroanatomic adaptations of men transitioning into fatherhood. The present study reports on an international collaboration between two laboratories, one in Spain and the other in California (United States), that have prospectively collected structural neuroimaging data in 20 expectant fathers before and after the birth of their first child.
The Spanish sample also included a control group of 17 childless men. We tested whether the transition into fatherhood entailed anatomical changes in brain cortical volume, thickness, and area, and subcortical volumes. We found overlapping trends of cortical volume reductions within the default mode network and visual networks and preservation of subcortical structures across both samples of first-time fathers, which persisted after controlling for fathers' and children's age at the postnatal scan.
This study provides convergent evidence for cortical structural changes in fathers, supporting the possibility that the transition to fatherhood may represent a meaningful window of experience-induced structural neuroplasticity in males.
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