Grief Changes Brain Chemistry In Women

Arif Najib, MD, with the University of Tübingen Medical Center in Tübingen, Germany used MRI scans to view brain changes of women after ending a romantic relationship. Najib’s findings indicate that grief produces considerable changes in the MRIs. His study appears in the December 2004 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry.

Najib thinks that depression may cause the brain to malfunction – especially the areas of normal circuitry for handling sadness, separation, and grief.

“In this current study, Najib and colleagues chose 11 female volunteers who were in the throes of grief over a recent breakup of a romantic relationship. Many were having trouble getting it out of their minds – a risk factor for major depression.

Najib’s researchers looked at brain scans while grieving women focused on sad thoughts about their romantic relationship. Then they performed brain imaging scans while women had neutral thoughts of a different person they had known for an equally long time.

During the study, the women were still having difficulty getting the loss out of their minds, but most had resolved their depressive symptoms.

Women still grieving over the romantic relationship had the greatest brain changes, he reports. Although there was increased brain activity in many regions associated with sadness, they also had much less activity in the brain region associated with emotion, motivation, and attention – the amygdala.”

This process has been viewed before in persons subjected to severe trauma. Researchers noted that the hippocampus, the center of memory, emotion, and learning, seemed to substantially decrease in these persons perhaps to avoid remembering the trauma. While we know that positive challenges shape the brain by increasing neural connections, we also know now that negative influences shape the brain negatively.

Print PDF