Pregnant women do not display impaired memory formation across one night of sleep.
J. Sleep Res. 30, e13204 (2021)
Forgetfulness is a common complaint of pregnant women, who also often report impaired nocturnal sleep. Considering sleep's well-known beneficial role in consolidating newly encoded memory content, we hypothesized that pregnant women would display detrimental changes in objective sleep measures and associated memory deficits. We compared the consolidation of declarative as well as procedural memory across sleep in 21 healthy, third-trimester pregnant women versus 20 matched non-pregnant controls. Subjects encoded and were tested on visuospatial and procedural memory tasks before and after, respectively, a night of sleep spent at home. The emergence of gist-based memories was tested with the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm. Sleep was polysomnographically recorded and subjective sleep quality was assessed with questionnaires. Although pregnant in comparison to non-pregnant women reported markedly impaired subjective sleep quality and efficiency, quantitative changes were limited to increases in wakefulness after sleep onset and reductions in rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. Retention of newly learned memory contents, which is believed to reflect sleep-associated memory consolidation, was comparable between groups, as was the formation of gist-based memories. The findings indicate that subjective deteriorations in sleep quality experienced by pregnant women are not necessarily linked to objective impairments. They raise the possibility that sufficient slow wave sleep towards the end of pregnancy allows for normal sleep-related memory consolidation. Although these results were obtained in a small number of pregnant women in very good health and should be corroborated in larger samples, they challenge the assumption of poor sleep and impaired memory as hallmarks of the "pregnancy brain".
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Publikationstyp
Artikel: Journalartikel
Dokumenttyp
Wissenschaftlicher Artikel
Typ der Hochschulschrift
Herausgeber
Schlagwörter
Cognitive Function ; Forgetfulness ; Pregnancy ; Sleep ; Slow Wave Sleep; False Memories; Motherhood; Quality
Keywords plus
Sprache
englisch
Veröffentlichungsjahr
2021
Prepublished im Jahr
2020
HGF-Berichtsjahr
2020
ISSN (print) / ISBN
0962-1105
e-ISSN
0962-1105
ISBN
Bandtitel
Konferenztitel
Konferzenzdatum
Konferenzort
Konferenzband
Quellenangaben
Band: 30,
Heft: 3,
Seiten: e13204
Artikelnummer: ,
Supplement: ,
Reihe
Verlag
Wiley
Verlagsort
Oxford
Tag d. mündl. Prüfung
0000-00-00
Betreuer
Gutachter
Prüfer
Topic
Hochschule
Hochschulort
Fakultät
Veröffentlichungsdatum
0000-00-00
Anmeldedatum
0000-00-00
Anmelder/Inhaber
weitere Inhaber
Anmeldeland
Priorität
Begutachtungsstatus
Peer reviewed
POF Topic(s)
90000 - German Center for Diabetes Research
Forschungsfeld(er)
Helmholtz Diabetes Center
PSP-Element(e)
G-502400-001
Förderungen
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF)
Copyright
Erfassungsdatum
2020-11-11