One of the most dramatic changes in a woman’s body occurs when she is pregnant. During the nine months and several months that follow, a woman goes through a lot of changes both mentally and physically. A recent study shows that pregnancy also affects the biological age of women. The more times a woman gets pregnant, the faster her biological age increases. Also, pregnancy has long-term effects on a woman’s body.
According to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, women who have become pregnant show more signs of biological aging than women who have never been pregnant before.
Calen Ryan is an associate research scientist at the Columbia University Aging Center in the Mailman School of Public Health. She and her team studied data from more than 1700 people in the Philippines who were part of a survey.
Researchers were working on this study regarding aging since 2005. (Symbolic photo: Shutterstock)
At the beginning of the study, in 2005, all participants were aged 20–25. They all provided blood samples and answered a few questions on their reproductive and sexual history, including how many times they had been pregnant and whether those pregnancies resulted in live births.
Ryan and his team used six epigenetic clocks that measured 19 different indicators. The study found that “women who had been pregnant at least once were biologically older than women of the same age who had not been pregnant.”
Additionally, the study found that pregnancy causes faster aging by four months to more than a year, about 3 percent more per year than women who have never been pregnant. Also, women with more than one pregnancy have a longer life expectancy by up to five months compared to women with one or fewer pregnancies.
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FIRST PUBLISHED: April 9, 2024, 20:20 IST
