The Biological Toll of Having Children – Pregnancy Makes Women Age Faster
(Link): Pregnancy Makes You Age Faster
April 8, 2024
by Alice Park
Pregnancy is a wonder of biology, but new research shows that feat may come at a price. In a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists found that women who have been pregnant showed more signs of biological aging compared to women who had never been pregnant before. The more times a woman had been pregnant, the faster her rate of biological aging.
“We’re learning that pregnancy has long-term effects on the body,” says Calen Ryan, associate research scientist at the Columbia University Aging Center at the Mailman School of Public Health. “They are not all bad, but it seems to increase the risk of some diseases and all-cause mortality.”
The study
Ryan and his team analyzed data from more than 1,700 people in the Philippines who were part of the Cebu Longitudinal Health and Nutrition Survey.
The participants, who were all ages 20 to 22 back in 2005 when the study began, provided blood samples and answered questions about their reproductive and sexual history, including how many times they had been pregnant and whether or not those pregnancies had resulted in live births. A smaller group of women provided additional blood samples from 2009 to 2014 to let researchers compare changes over time.
[The article explains how the blood of the participants was studied]
What they found
Ryan and his team used six such epigenetic clocks, which assessed 19 different indicators including changes to the length of chromosomes (which shorten the more a cell divides), to assess the participants’ ages. They found that overall, women who had been pregnant at least once were biologically older than women of the same age who had not been pregnant. Pregnancy led to anywhere from four months to more than a year of faster aging, at a rate of about 3% more per year than women who had never been pregnant.
The researchers then looked at how being pregnant more than once might affect measures of aging. Women with more pregnancies aged up to five months faster compared to women with fewer pregnancies, or an acceleration of the pace of aging by nearly 2% a year per pregnancy.
Those measures looked at the women as a whole, so changes could have been due to more dramatic changes in some women compared to others. To zoom in on the effects of pregnancy, Ryan then focused on a smaller group of women and compared each woman’s epigenetic clock results at the start of the study to those up to nine years later. These results were more mixed, and women who had been pregnant more times showed more changes on only two of the epigenetic clocks, compared to women with fewer pregnancies.
Finally, as a type of control to ensure that they accounted for other factors that could affect aging—such as exposure to air pollution, smoking, and socioeconomic status—the group used the same six epigenetic clocks on the men in the study. They found that the number of children the men fathered had no association to the pace of their biological aging.
… How pregnancy could age the body
There is still a lot more to learn about the association between pregnancy and aging. One explanation for the connection could involve the idea that pregnancy takes a major physical toll on the body, in terms of energy and resources. “The idea is that the body performs certain functions, but is always constrained about optimizing any one of those functions, and it creates a tradeoff,” says Ryan. “So energy going toward reproductive function may draw away from maintenance of the body.”
From 2018:
(Link): Having children ages women MORE than smoking and obesity
Excerpts:
February 23, 2018
Having children ages women’s DNA by 11 years, new research suggests.
Giving birth shortens women’s telomeres by around 4.2 per cent, a study found.
Telomeres ‘cap’ the end of DNA strands, with longer lengths being associated with slower aging, longer lifespans and improved overall health.
Such an extent of telomere shortening is greater than the effects of smoking or obesity demonstrated in previous studies.
Study author Dr Anna Pollack from George Mason University, Virginia, told New Scientist: ‘We were surprised to find such a striking result. It is equivalent to around 11 years of accelerated cellular ageing.’
Researchers believe this may be due to the stress of raising children, particularly in countries without mandatory maternity leave, such as the US.
Related:
(Link): Tokophobia – Too Afraid To Have A Baby by A. Lauretta
(Link): Are Single Women Portrayed as Aging Faster Than Married Women? by B. DePaulo
(Link): I Regret Having a Baby – I’d Rather Watch NetFlix, by A. Klausner
(Link): Matt Walsh Again Insults Single, Childless Woman For Being Single, Childless and Enjoying Her Life
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