Pregnancy tips Pregnancy Hormones May Repair Nervous System

Pregnancy can really help your body in many ways, but here's one I've never heard of. It is thought that prolactin can help repair nerve damage or at least minimize it. This may lead to future treatments for women with MS and other neurological diseases. Read more:



www.scientificamerican.com



From the article:



"It was thought that during pregnancy, their immune systems no longer destroyed the myelin," says Samuel Weiss of Hotchkiss Brain Institute in Calgary and co-author of the study published in The Journal of Neuroscience. "No previous study has tested whether pregnancy actually results in the production of new myelin, which may explain [the] improvement of symptoms."



Weiss and his colleagues compared healthy pregnant and virgin mice of the same age to determine whether differences in myelin formation were taking place. The researchers found that there were twice as many oligodendrocytes (nerve cells that produce myelin) in the brains of pregnant mice and, also, that the mice continued to produce oligodendrocytes throughout their pregnancies, leading to 50 percent more myelin sheathing in their nerve cells than in those of their virgin counterparts.