A new study has revealed that pregnancy can make the process of biological ageing faster in women. During the study, the researchers examined 825 women and found that each pregnancy a woman reported was linked with an additional two to three months of biological ageing.
The study also revealed that women who reported being pregnant more often during a six-year follow-up period showed a greater increase in biological ageing during that period.
During the study, the team of scientists at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health in New York analysed the reproductive histories and DNA samples from 1,735 people in a long-term, continuing health survey in the Philippines to investigate the influence pregnancy has on the aging process.
According to a report by The Guardian, the scientists calculated the biological age using six different “epigenetic clocks”. It is a genetic tool that estimates biological age based on patterns of a process called DNA methylation.
It is noteworthy that the association between pregnancy and biological ageing was also influenced by factors like socioeconomic status, smoking, genetic variation and the built environment in participants’ surroundings.
The findings of the study were published in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences journal.
According to The Guardian report, the authors failed to find a link between increased biological ageing and the number of pregnancies fathered by 910 same-aged men from the same health survey.
“Our findings suggest that pregnancy speeds up biological ageing, and that these effects are apparent in young, high-fertility women. Our results are also the first to follow the same women through time, linking changes in each woman’s pregnancy number to changes in her biological age,” Calen Ryan, the lead author of the study and an associate research scientist in the Columbia Aging Center, said, as quoted by The Guardian.
According to Ryan, many of the reported pregnancies in our baseline measure occurred during late adolescence, when women are still growing.
“We expect this kind of pregnancy to be particularly challenging for a growing mother, especially if her access to healthcare, resources or other forms of support is limited. We still have a lot to learn about the role of pregnancy and other aspects of reproduction in the ageing process. We also do not know the extent to which accelerated epigenetic ageing in these particular individuals will manifest as poor health or mortality decades later in life,” he said.