The University Hospital

Funding research on a socially taboo topic

Neuroscientist from Tübingen receives ERC grant to study the brain after pregnancy loss.

Prof. Dr. Tobias Kaufmann, Professor of Neurotechnology and Computational Psychiatry at the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy in Tübingen, has received a Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) for his research project "Modeling and maintaining maternal mental health". The project on neuroscientific research into brain plasticity after pregnancy loss will be funded with a total of around 2 million euros over a period of five years. With the ERC Consolidator Grants, the ERC supports excellent researchers in consolidating their scientific careers.

Pregnancy loss is still a socially taboo subject that is relatively rarely talked about openly. Yet in Germany, about 15 percent of all recognized pregnancies end in early pregnancy loss and about four out of every 1,000 pregnancies end in stillbirth. The early loss of a child is often a traumatic event for the parents-to-be, and its impact on the mothers affected is often underestimated. Thus, their risk for mental illness is significantly increased after pregnancy loss - not only immediately, but also in subsequent pregnancies.

"Pregnancy loss is a neuroscientifically under-researched topic. It is known that the female brain is restructured in the course of pregnancy, however, we do not know what dynamics underlie these processes when pregnancy is lost. We also know little about which factors act together on the brain after pregnancy loss and how mental illness manifests in the brains of affected women. This is precisely where our research comes in, and we hope to gain a better understanding of the process by which mental illnesses develop," explains Prof. Kaufmann.

Mental illnesses do not have one trigger, but are usually based on several factors. In studying the particularly critical phase after pregnancy loss, the scientists want to analyze the interplay of various factors, such as genetics or hormones, and sociostructural influences. The aim is to find out how these factors affect the structure and function of the brain over a period of time.

To this end, women are accompanied in the weeks following their pregnancy loss and examined several times in order to build up a broad database, which is then analyzed using complex statistical methods. Based on these studies, Prof. Kaufmann's team hopes to gain insights into the development of mental illnesses.