A study has found that pregnancy can speed up biological ageing in women. Scientists at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health in New York have conducted this study. Their research has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study looked at the reproductive histories and DNA samples from 1,735 people in the long term.
They continued the health survey in the Philippines to investigate the influence pregnancy has on the ageing process. They calculated the participants’ biological age using six different epigenetic clocks- genetic tools that estimate biological age based on patterns of a process called DNA methylation. DNA methylation is one of the prominent epigenetic modifications that control gene expression by altering chromosomal structure, DNA conformation, DNA stability and the link between DNA and protein.
This research involving 825 young women found that each pregnancy a woman reported was linked with an additional two to three months of biological ageing. The women who reported being pregnant more often during a six-year follow-up period showed a greater increase in biological ageing during that period.
Calen Ryan talked about this study in an interview with The Guardian. Ryan is the lead author of the study and an associate research scientist at the Columbia Aging Center. He said, “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.”
According to Ryan, many of the reported pregnancies in the baseline measure happened during late adolescence, when women are still growing. He said that 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.
Ryan added that they still have a lot to know about the role of pregnancy and other dimensions of reproduction in the ageing process. According to him, it is still not known the extent to which accelerated epigenetic ageing in these particular individuals will manifest as poor health or mortality decades later in life.
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