Parity is associated with cognitive function and brain age in both females and males.
Level 3 - non-randomized controlled study
Large observational cohort analysis of UK Biobank data
PubMed 32269255 · doi:10.1038/s41598-020-63014-7
What was done
The authors analyzed cross-sectional data from 303,196 female and male participants in the UK Biobank to examine associations between parity (number of offspring) and cognitive performance (reaction time and visual memory task errors). In a neuroimaging subgroup of 13,584 participants, they evaluated the association between parity and relative brain age, an MRI-derived structural biomarker comparing individual brain appearance to peer averages.
What was found
In both females and males, having offspring was associated with faster response times and fewer visual memory mistakes compared to being childless. The largest differences were seen in participants with two or three children relative to childless individuals, with larger effects observed in men. In the imaging subset (n = 13,584), having two or three children was significantly associated with a reduced relative brain age in both sexes. The abstract reports no numerical effect sizes, test statistics, confidence intervals, or p-values.
Why it matters
Because the cognitive and structural brain associations were present in both males and females, the findings suggest that social and lifestyle factors associated with raising children, rather than the biological process of pregnancy alone, may relate to differences in adult brain aging.
Limits
The study design is observational and cross-sectional, which precludes causal inference. The abstract provides no quantitative effect sizes, variance estimates, or p-values. Factors such as socioeconomic status, baseline health differences, and healthy-volunteer selection bias in the UK Biobank were not detailed in the abstract.
Cited by
- supports Studies find that both men and women who report having had more children show markers of a younger-looking brain age.
- supports UK Biobank brain scan analyses show that men and women with more children exhibit markers of a younger brain age in their 50s and 60s, with the effect leveling off after two or three children.