South Asia Times News Bulletin

Moms should not blame their pregnancy for their memory loss, a new study has claimed the "baby brain" idea, that bearing a child affects one's mind power, is only a myth.
Previous studies suggested that women’s brains decline in size upto 4 percent at the time of pregnancy, leading to worse performance on tests of memory and verbal skills.

Now, an international team, led by Australian National University in Canberra, has found that pregnancy is not at all linked to memory loss in women, the latest edition of 'British Journal of Psychiatry' reported.

And, according to researchers, pregnant women should be encouraged to stop attributing lapses in memory or logical thinking to their growing baby. Lead researcher Prof Helen Christensen said that the"baby brain" effect was "a myth".

"Not so long ago, pregnancy was 'confinement' and motherhood meant the end of career aspirations. But our results challenge the view that mothers are anything other than the intellectual peers of their contemporaries," 'The Times' quoted her as saying.

For their study, the researchers recruited 1,241 women aged 20-24 in 1999 and 2003 and asked them to perform a series of tasks.The women were followed up at four-year intervals and asked to perform the same cognitive tests. A total of 77 women were pregnant at the follow-up assessments,188 had become mothers and 542 remained childless.

The findings revealed no significant differences in cognitive change for those women who were pregnant or new mothers during the assessments and those who were not.