By Jenny Hope
London - Pregnant women like to laugh off memory lapses by claiming that carrying a baby makes them forgetful.
But, the latest research into "baby brain" or "preghead" syndrome shows there is in fact no such thing. In memory tests, women were found to perform just as well when they were expecting a child as when they weren't.
They carried out cognitive tests on 1 241 women aged from 20 to 24 and followed up with checks at four-year intervals. Seventy-six of the women were pregnant during the follow-up tests but still suffered no decline in their powers of recall.
The same was true of the 188 women who became pregnant between tests, according to a report in the British Journal of Psychiatry.
The study team at the Australian National University in Canberra concluded that neither pregnancy nor motherhood damaged brain power.
Professor Helen Christensen, who led the research, said: "Our results challenge the view that mothers are anything other than the intellectual peers of their contemporaries.
"Women and their partners need to be less automatic in their willingness to attribute common memory lapses to a growing or new baby."
Preghead syndrome has attracted growing attention recently. Sarah Montague, a British radio presenter, blamed carrying a baby for her having to ask a colleague on air: "Where am I?"
But Ros Crawley, a cognitive psychologist at Sunderland University, says women should not feel at the mercy of their hormones.
"The idea that women become forgetful and absent-minded during pregnancy has become a stereotype in our society, but my own studies have found little difference in cognitive function between women who are or are not pregnant," she said.
"The design of the Australian study, where women were recruited before they were pregnant, provides strong evidence that it is time to stop believing in the myth of pregnancy-related cognitive decline."
Cathy Warwick, of the Royal College of Midwives, said: "It is about time that research lays to rest this notion of pregnant women and the baby brain myth. The physical and emotional stresses on a woman's body from pregnancy can make women feel more tired than usual. Tiredness can make us lose concentration and cause us to function less effectively.
Justine Roberts, co-founder of Mumsnet, a parenting website, said: "Pregnancy for most women is a time of patchy sleep and great hormonal change.
"So, it's not surprising that lots of Mumsnet posters report that they go through a temporary state of battiness in which they regularly put the car keys in the tea caddy, butter in their coffee and the like," she said. - Daily Mail