2025-02-26 ラトガース大学
<関連情報>
- https://www.rutgers.edu/news/how-parenthood-may-help-keep-your-brain-young
- https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2411245122
中年期から晩年期における加齢に関連した脳機能に対する育児の保護的役割 Protective role of parenthood on age-related brain function in mid- to late-life
Edwina R. Orchard, Sidhant Chopra, Leon Q. R. Ooi, +5, and Avram J. Holmes
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Published:February 25, 2025
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2411245122
Significance
The profound and prolonged impacts of parenthood on both body and mind have been long overlooked, resulting in a missing timepoint for understanding adult human brain development across the lifespan. Using the largest population-based neuroimaging dataset to date, we find parenting more children is associated with higher brain-wide functional connectivity, especially in networks associated with movement and sensation. These same networks showed lower functional connectivity associated with higher age, suggesting that parenthood might protect against functional brain aging. This effect is observed in both females and males, implicating the caregiving environment, rather than pregnancy alone. Overall, these results suggest that parenthood may be neuroprotective in later life, underscoring the need for future research to understand the mechanisms of these effects.
Abstract
The experience of human parenthood is near ubiquitous and can profoundly alter one’s body, mind, and environment. However, we know very little about the long-term neural effects of parenthood for parents themselves, or the implications of pregnancy and caregiving experience on the aging adult brain. Here, we investigate the link between the number of children parented and age on brain function in 19,964 females and 17,607 males from the UK Biobank. In both females and males, parenthood was positively correlated with functional connectivity, such that higher number of children parented was associated with higher connectivity, particularly within the somato/motor network. Critically, the spatial topography of parenthood-linked effects was inversely correlated with the impact of age on functional connectivity across the brain for both females and males, such that the connections that were positively correlated with number of children were negatively correlated with age. This result suggests that a higher number of children is associated with patterns of brain function in the opposite direction to age-related alterations. Overall, these results indicate that the changes accompanying parenthood may confer benefits to brain health across the lifespan, altering aging trajectories, consistent with animal models of parenthood and preliminary findings of “younger-looking” brain structure in human parents. Observing this effect in both females and males implicates the caregiving environment, rather than pregnancy alone, and highlights the importance of future work to disentangle the underlying mechanisms related to the direct impact of caregiving, the indirect impact of the environment, and the result of covarying sociodemographic factors.
