mothers

Motherhood may make women smarter and help prevent Alzheimer’s by bathing the brain in protective hormones. Tests on rats show that the ones who raise two or more litters of pups do better in tests of memory and skills than rats who have no babies. Their brains also show changes that suggest they may be protected against Alzheimer’s.

“Our research shows that the hormones of pregnancy are protecting the brain, including estrogen, which we know has many neuroprotective effects,” says researcher Craig Kinsley. “When people think about pregnancy, they think about what happens to infants and the mother from the neck down. They do not realize that hormones are washing on the brain.?
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Mothers who have complained through the centuries that their sons will be the death of them may be right — a Finnish study shows having boys shortens a woman’s life span. Each son takes an average of 34 weeks off a woman’s life, says evolutionary biologist Samuli Helle. On the other hand, having daughters adds, but only very slightly, to a woman’s life span.

Helle was trying to prove that having large families can cause women to die early. But his study of church records among the Sami people of northern Scandinavia found that family size did not reliably predict that a woman would die young. He says, “We found that maternal longevity was not related to the total number of children born or raised to adulthood?”
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