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Thursday, June 23, 2005

So that explains it?

A new Canadian study has come up with a startling attempt to explain the ditsy feeling so many women report during their pregancies. Writing in NeuroReport, the researchers, PhD candidate Claire Vanston (quoted in "The Mommy Brain") and neuroscience professor Neil Watson at Simon Fraser University say it's all a matter of gender -- the unborn baby's gender, that is. Women carrying male fetuses consistently do better on the hardest memory function tests than women pregnant with girls, they've found. "We were quite shocked by the results because when we began, we weren't thinking about fetal sex as being a factor," Watson has said. The study is based on findings from 43 Vancouver-area women who were subjected to a battery of cognition tests from early in their pregnancies to several months after they gave birth. Comparing women bearing boys and those with girls, the researchers found no general difference in intellect, but that the former group outperformed the latter in tasks involving certain aspects of short-term memory.
As I note in "The Mommy Brain," the many inquiries into this subject to date have yielded wildly varying results, with some studies suggesting that the hormones of motherhood temporarily cloud women's concentration and others demonstrating no change or even an improvement. I see this report as one more in that intriguing series and certainly worth noting as research on what is being called the "maternal brain" continues. Yet I continue to believe that every woman's pregnancy experience is different, a product of her pre-pregnancy experience, social support, mood, adequacy of sleep and dozens of other factors, very definitely including the mother's expectations of how she will fare. What do you think?

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