IN LAURA GLYNN’S LAB, THE EFFECTS OF PREGNANCY AND PARENTHOOD GET SPECIAL SCRUTINY, DRIVING HOPES FOR ADVANCES IN PREVENTIVE CARE
Scientist Laura Glynn has long been interested in the perinatal period and its implications for both mothers and children. Her work could someday help physicians flag conditions that contribute to preterm birth and postpartum depression in women and cognitive delays and mental health problems in children.
Glynn’s research contributes to a growing body of literature showing that what happens during pregnancy is increasingly understood to have lifelong impact on the baby’s brain structure, as well as the mother’s.
But the Chapman University professor of psychology can’t help but smile when she gets the “mommy brain” question. The routine realities of pregnancy and maternal brain development capture her attention, too. So, naturally, people ask about so-called mommy brain, that bit of mental fuzziness surrounding childbirth that leads to lost car keys or forgotten appointments.
“It’s hard to acknowledge that not every aspect of motherhood is positive,” Glynn says.
Don’t fret, though. “Mommy brain” typically is mild and does not impair significant decision-making. And Glynn, Ph.D., understands the interest. She, too, is curious to understand how this phase of female life noodles with a woman’s brain, cognition and behavior.
“This is part of what spurred my work – women saying, ‘I’m different after pregnancy,’” Glynn says. “For me as a researcher, that is near and dear to my heart. It is an underappreciated fact that pregnancy represents a period of neurological growth for a mom and that this is a sensitive period of development in a woman’s lifespan. To understand things like postpartum depression, or how a woman becomes a sensitive, caring mother, we really need to understand this reproduction transition that’s largely been ignored by scientists.”
Glynn is helping to close up that knowledge gap. She leads Chapman’s Early Human and Lifespan Development Research Program, which makes its home in a historic schoolhouse refurbished by Chapman to house Glynn’s lab.
For nearly 20 years, she has been involved in an $8 million longitudinal study funded by a number of different agencies, including the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. The project is currently supported by the National Institute of Mental Health’s Silvio O. Conte Centers, which are hubs of neuroscience research established at several universities. The goal of this long-term study is to understand how prenatal and early life experience influences mental health in both women and children.
Along with making home visits to mothers and children, research staff and undergraduate research assistants interview, videotape and observe the same participants for years, gathering information on physical and emotional development as well as family life and economic circumstances. The oldest in this cohort of children are turning 18, so researchers have shifted their information gathering to include behaviors and pathologies of young adulthood. Such information may help Glynn discover links between early-childhood exposures and adult health conditions, ranging from obesity to depression.
In collaboration with grant partners at University of California campuses in Irvine and Los Angeles, Glynn has reported on a variety of study findings through the years. In one study, she and other researchers identified patterns affecting African American women who suffered multiple racist experiences in childhood. Rates of premature birth and maternal high blood pressure increased, as did those of low-birth-weight infants.
Glynn hopes more research like this can help clinicians create better intervention strategies and treatment plans that would improve health outcomes for mothers and their children.
“It’s hard to lift kids out of poverty. But maybe you can buffer the impacts,” she says.