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.”
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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 khbrknews.
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All of the blood samples were analyzed for a number of biological factors associated with aging, including changes in DNA known as epigenetic modifications. As cells age, they accumulate molecular imprints of which genes have been turned on or off, and these changes can serve as a proxy for how biologically old the cells are. These so-called “epigenetic clocks” can also capture the effects of things such as stress and other physiological and psychological experiences that impact cells, and therefore make the cells either “older” or “younger” than their chronological age.
What they found
Ryan and his team used six such epigenetic clocks, which…
