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Mothers-to-be who engage in moderate-intensity physical activity during pregnancy help their baby’s brain develop faster in the womb, according to a Université de Montréal study. And researchers in the university’s kinesiology department believe this early edge may have positive, lifelong effects.
It doesn’t take much
The team placed soft helmets, outfitted with 124 electrodes, on the heads of eight to 12-day old babies whose randomly selected mothers were either active or sedentary during their second trimester. They gauged the babies’ reactions to frequent and infrequent sounds by analyzing their electrical brain waves.
What researchers found was that the brains of babies born to active mothers functioned cognitively at the same level as those of eight-month-old babies. And all it took to affect change was at least 20 minutes of aerobic exercise, three times a week.
“Some doctors and nurses still recommend that women not exercise, or recommend that they be careful,” says study researcher Élise Labonté-Lemoyne. “They are kind of put on a shelf like porcelain dolls. What we’re trying to show is that physical exercise benefits the child, just as much as the mother.”
What causes brain functions to improve in the fetus? It’s not yet clear , though one possible explanation might be that consumption of oxygen increases during physical activity. “Given that exercise has been demonstrated to be beneficial for the adult’s brain, we hypothesized that it could also be beneficial for the unborn child through the mother’s actions,” co-researcher Daniel Curnier told The Canadian Press.
A caveat
Experiments in rats a decade ago gave the first hint of a link between maternal exercise and changes in the fetal brain. Researchers say it’s the first time anyone has looked into the impact of prenatal physical activity on human babies’ neuronal development, but the early findings are based on a sample of only 18 women.
They’re still recruiting pregnant mothers to participate in the study. The team also plans to measure the cognitive abilities of babies at 12 months to determine if they still show differences in their brain circuitry.
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