Pregnancy, Postpartum and Parity: Resilience and Vulnerability in Brain Health and Disease-deems 2020

Risk and resilience in brain health and disease can be influenced by a variety of factors. While there is a growing appreciation to consider sex as one of these factors, far less attention has been paid to sex-specific variables that may differentially impact females such as pregnancy and reproductive history. In this review, we focus on nervous system disorders which show a female bias and for which there is data from basic research and clinical studies pointing to modification in disease risk and progression during pregnancy, postpartum and/or as a result of parity: multiple sclerosis (MS), depression, stroke, and Alzheimer’s disease (AD). In doing so, we join others (Shors, 2016; Galea et al., 2018) in aiming to illustrate the importance of looking beyond sex in neuroscience research.

Deems, Nicholas P, and Benedetta Leuner. “Pregnancy, Postpartum and Parity: Resilience and Vulnerability in Brain Health and Disease.” Frontiers in Neuroendocrinology, U.S. National Library of Medicine, Apr. 2020, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7225072/.