Can we really suffer from pregnancy brain?

Since I delivered my children with epidural anesthesia, I call it epidural brain. Others call it momnesia. Some say pregnancy brain. A new Australian study says, physical changes of pregnancy and motherhood do not cause women to have memory lapses or other cognitive problems.

”When focused on a task, women who are pregnant or new mothers do not have ‘cognitive deficits,’ and perform as well as their non-pregnant contemporaries,” says the study’s lead author Dr. Helen Christensen, PhD, a researcher at The Australian National University in Canberra. Her study is published in The British Journal of Psychiatry.

The momnesia theory is so widely accepted that many pregnancy guides even warn women about the possibility of short-term memory problems during pregnancy.

Dr. Christensen point out that biologically, there is nothing that happens to a woman’s brain when she’s pregnant or after giving birth to mess with her faculties. It’s just that, new mothers may exhibit lapses in memory or some absent-mindednes because they are focused on the new child or an upcoming major life change that is giving birth.

Well, of course! Makes complete common sense. It wasn’t my epidural, it was me focusing all my attention on my kids. It’s good to know my brain has not suffered any physical degradation! Here’s how Dr. Christensen’s team figured out their contention that mommy brain is a myth:

Researchers evaluated women who had joined the Personality and Total Health (PATH) Through Life Project, a large community-based study in 1999 that focused on health and well-being. She compared the women and their cognitive test results at four-year intervals, in 2003 and 2007.

Christensen tested 1,241 women (age 20-24) at the start, in 1999, to provide a baseline result. Over the eight years of the study, after subtracting dropouts, 76 women were pregnant at follow-up interviews, either in 2003 or 2007; 188 became moms but were not pregnant at the time of the interview. Another 542 didn’t become pregnant. Only first-time moms and women pregnant for the first time were included.

No significant differences were found in those who were pregnant or new moms and those who weren’t.

Late pregnancy was associated with poorer performance on a test of mental speed, the researchers found. But overall, no substantial differences were found.

”We will continue to follow the sample, with 542 non-mothers, and an age range of 28 to 32 now,” Dr. Christensen says.

Another good point against momnesia was raised by Dr. Ros Crawley PhD at the University of Sunderland, UK. They had a 2008 study that produced the same results — pregnant and non-pregnant women fared equally in cognitive tests.

”We have suggested that it may be that pregnant women have internalized a societal stereotype that suggests they will become more forgetful and absentminded,” according to Crawley. If you believe the myth, you can make it real. So pregnant women and new moms… your brains are fine. Believe that!

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