TY  - JOUR
AU  - Lotter, Leon
AU  - Nehls, Susanne
AU  - Losse, Elena
AU  - Dukart, Jürgen
AU  - Chechko, Natalya
TI  - Temporal dissociation between local and global functional adaptations of the maternal brain to childbirth: a longitudinal assessment
JO  - Neuropsychopharmacology
VL  - 49
SN  - 0893-133X
CY  - London
PB  - Springer Nature
M1  - FZJ-2024-05479
SP  - 1809-1818
PY  - 2024
N1  - FundingThe study was funded by the Rotation Program (2015–2017) of the Medical Faculty, University Hospital RWTH Aachen, and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG; 410314797 and 512021469). Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.
AB  - The maternal brain undergoes significant reorganization during birth and the postpartum period. However, the temporal dynamics of these changes remain unclear. Using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging, we report on local and global brain function alterations in 75 mothers in their first postpartum week, compared to 23 nulliparous women. In a subsample followed longitudinally for the next six months, we observed a temporal and spatial dissociation between changes observed at baseline (cluster mass permutation: pFWE < 0.05). Local activity and connectivity changes in widespread neocortical regions persisted throughout the studied time period (ANCOVAs vs. controls: pFDR < 0.05), with preliminary evidence linking these alterations to behavioral and psychological adaptations (interaction effect with postpartum time: uncorrected p < 0.05). In contrast, the initially reduced whole-brain connectivity of putamen-centered subcortical areas returned to control levels within six to nine weeks postpartum (linear and quadratic mixed linear models: pFDR < 0.05). The whole-brain spatial colocalization with hormone receptor distributions (Spearman correlations: pFDR < 0.05) and preliminary blood hormone associations (interaction effect with postpartum time: uncorrected p < 0.05) suggested that the postpartum restoration of progesterone levels may underlie this rapid normalization. These observations enhance our understanding of healthy maternal brain function, contributing to the identification of potential markers for pathological postpartum adaptation processes, which in turn could underlie postpartum psychiatric disorders.
LB  - PUB:(DE-HGF)16
C6  - 38769432
UR  - <Go to ISI:>//WOS:001228387400001
DO  - DOI:10.1038/s41386-024-01880-9
UR  - https://juser.fz-juelich.de/record/1030870
ER  -