At an airport while pregnant, she frantically paced a parking lot, searching for her Jeep. After an hour, she called her husband to tell him that their car had been stolen. But then she realized that she had just gone to the wrong parking lot.
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That wasn't her only memory glitch. "I also went to the wrong airport twice on the same trip, and another time, I was sitting at the wrong gate and completely missed my flight," Blakeslee says.
Many pregnant women and mothers can relate. Those bouts of forgetfulness go by many names, including:
pregnancy brain
mommy brain
pregnancy amnesia
momnesia
But a recent study questions whether pregnancy brain exists. Who is right -- the moms or the researchers? And how can you handle fuzzy memory during pregnancy? Here are answers.
Pregnancy Brain Is Real
"If you read pregnancy manuals and listen to pregnant mothers – yes, there is such a thing as pregnancy brain or momnesia, and there is also evidence from research showing deficits in memory," says Helen Christensen, PhD, of The Australian National University.
But "the evidence from our study shows that the capacity of the brain is unaltered in pregnancy," Christensen tells WebMD in an email.
That is, a pregnant woman's brain is unchanged, though she may not be as razor sharp as she once was.
Reasons for Pregnancy Brain
Blakeslee's forgetfulness is understandable. Like many moms, her life swirls like a tornado. She constantly handles the needs and wants of her two young kids, a torrent of other household tasks and chores -- and she rarely, if ever, gets a good night's sleep.
Under these circumstances, it is 100% normal to have memory lapses or be forgetful, Christenson says.
Jane Martin, assistant professor of psychiatry and director of the Neuropsychological Testing and Evaluation Center at New York's Mount Sinai Medical Center, agrees.
"When you are not getting enough sleep and are multitasking, nobody's memory is good," Martin says. "You are not cognitively sharp when you haven't slept well."
The research is pouring in: obesity during pregnancy poses a tremendous risk to the health of the unborn child. Children of obese mothers are born as pre-diabetics or with serious birth defects that can lead to kidney disease or heart disease, among other problems.
The fact that obesity in expectant mothers leads to health problems in their unborn children is not in dispute. What is in question, though, is how this should be handled. Given that obesity is a condition caused by lifestyle choices made by the mother, doesn't the mother have a responsibility to protect the health of her unborn child by altering her lifestyle?
To answer this question, take a closer look at the impact of alcohol and cigarette smoking on unborn children. Both habits cause horrifying birth defects and impair the unborn child's long-term health. It has long been argued that expectant mothers who engage in drinking alcohol or smoking cigarettes are, in effect, abusing their unborn children by exposing them to these toxic chemicals at precisely the time when such chemicals can have devastating effects.
I agree with this assessment: pregnant women who drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes are, in my view, not just acting irresponsibly, they are guilty of crimes by consciously and willingly endangering the health of their children. In doing so, they forfeit their right to have children in the first place. Because, after all, if a woman can't stop smoking and drinking during pregnancy, she has no right to bring another human being into this world -- a human being that will be crippled from the start.
Does the same argument apply to obesity? Is an obese expectant mother also committing a crime against her unborn child? I don't think society is ready for that sort of designation, but it's time to get serious about the nutritional responsibility women have to their unborn children. There's also a responsiblity in society, I believe, to help assist pregnant women in achieving optimum nutritional goals. Nutritional supplements, for example, should be made available to all pregnant women at no cost (funded by taxpayers).
I believe that pregnant women who are obese should, at the very least, be required to undergo counseling that helps them understand why their current lifestyle habits and choices are so dangerous to the health of their unborn child. But whether society can be called upon to actually enforce health requirements on would-be mothers is another matter altogether. In a police state society, perhaps, women would not be allowed to reproduce until they demonstrated an acceptable degree of self health. But that's not the society we live in, nor one that I desire.
What do you think should be done here? Should expectant mothers be responsible for the health of their unborn children? Should they be somehow penalized for remaining obese during pregnancy? Is obesity during pregnancy the same as child abuse?
Diabetes in Pregnancy Raises Risk of Future Diabetes
According to the American Diabetes Association, gestational diabetes affects 18% of pregnancies. Some women with gestational diabetes go on to develop type 2 diabetes years later.African-American women are less likely than other women to develop gestational diabetes in the first place. When they do, they are 52% more likely to be diagnosed with diabetes in the future than white women who have gestational diabetes.The new study is published in Diabetologia."Women who have gestational diabetes should be advised about diet and exercise and to watch out for other diabetes risk factors.
And this is particularly important for African-American women," says study researcher Anny H. Xiang, MD. She is a senior research scientist at the Kaiser Permanente Department of Research and Evaluation in Pasadena, Calif.The reasons that African-American women face a higher risk for developing diabetes in the future are not known. But the prevention message is clear. "These women need screening to see if their blood sugar or glucose is elevated, and they should engage in more exercise and watch their weight," Xiang says.Exercise and weight loss can lower diabetes risk.For the study, researchers reviewed information on 77,666 women who gave birth from 1995 to 2009.
An African-American woman's risk of developing diabetes was almost 10 times greater if she had developed gestational diabetes during a past pregnancy than if she did not.By contrast, non-Hispanic white women were 6.5 times more likely to develop diabetes if they had gestational diabetes. Hispanic women were 7.7 times more likely to develop diabetes if they had diabetes during pregnancy. Asian/Pacific Islander women were 6.3 times more likely to develop diabetes if they had a history of gestational diabetes.The new findings suggest that a woman's race and ethnicity should be a factor during counseling about diabetes risk after pregnancy, Xiang says.
