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The research constitutes some of the first evidence that the condition is associated with modifications in the brain before childbirth.
Postpartum depression affects about one in every seven women who give birth, but little is known about what happens in the brains of pregnant women who experience it. A new study begins to shed some light.
Researchers scanned the brains of dozens of women in the weeks before and after childbirth and found that two brain areas involved in the processing and control of emotions increased in size in women who developed symptoms of postpartum depression.
The results, published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, constitute some of the first evidence that postpartum depression is associated with changes in the brain during pregnancy.
Researchers found that women with symptoms of depression in the first month after giving birth also had increases in the volume of their amygdala, a brain area that plays a key role in emotional processing. Women who rated their childbirth experience as difficult or stressful — a perception that is often associated with postpartum depression — also showed increases in the volume of the hippocampus, a brain area that helps regulate emotions.
“This is really the first step in trying to understand how does the brain change in people who have a normal course of pregnancy and then those who experience perinatal depression, and what can we do about it,” said Dr. Sheila Shanmugan, an assistant professor of psychiatry, obstetrics-gynecology and radiology at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the study.
“The big takeaways are about how there are these really profound brain changes during pregnancy and how now we’re seeing it in depression circuitry specifically,” she said.