Close pregnancies may influence long-term maternal ageing, review suggests

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By Olivia Bowthorpe

The duration between pregnancies may affect how fully a woman's biological age recovers afterwards, a review suggests.

Researchers looked at how pregnancy causes a temporary increase in biological age, as estimated by DNA methylation patterns and physiological biomarkers,and how long a patient needs to recover from this.

"Each pregnancy deposits a recoverable ageing increment, and whether that increment is erased or compounded depends on how much time elapses before the next conception,"Dr Jesse Poganik, instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School, and colleagues wrote in Trends in Endocrinology & Metabolism.

"Incomplete postpartum biological age recovery, driven by factors including body mass index, breastfeeding, and psychosocial stress, may produce persistent elevation that compounds across successive pregnancies."

This phenomenon could explain the inconsistent link between the number of pregnancies and a woman's long-term mortality, seen in many studies.

Poganik said: "Our previous research has found that biological age transiently rises, peaking around the third trimester or at the time of delivery. It’s possible that this could change the overall trajectory of ageing."