2024-03-27 12:14:57
Health Biological age
Why pregnancy makes you old – and childbirth rejuvenates you
Status: 28.03.2024 | Reading time: 3 minutes
Pregnancy puts the body under considerable stress
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Hormones, food cravings, energy levels: pregnancy affects the entire body – and even leads to changes in the genes. Researchers are now proving how much pregnant women age biologically as a result. And what has a rejuvenating effect after birth.
Unhealthy food, alcohol, nicotine and stress: all of these make people age faster. However, pregnancy also makes you old – at least temporarily. An international team of researchers is now shedding light on the exact mechanisms behind this in the journal “Cell Metabolism“.
It’s no secret that a woman’s body changes extensively during pregnancy: The growing fetus shifts the organs in her abdomen, pelvic joints become looser, pregnancy hormones change appetite and energy levels, and even the neurons in the brain sometimes permanently rewire themselves.
Last year, a research group from Harvard Medical School reportedthat the stress of pregnancy could significantly increase a woman’s biological age. This biological age can differ significantly from the chronological age, which corresponds to the actual years of life: it is determined by genetic and external influences, which also include lifestyle.
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A team led by perinatal researcher Kieran O’Donnell and biostatistician Hung Pham from the Yale School of Medicine now examined these connections using a larger group of test subjects. Specifically, the researchers analyzed blood samples from 119 women at various times during and after their pregnancy.
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They focused on so-called DNA methylations. These are tiny chemical modifications of the genetic material that – unlike DNA itself – can change over the course of a lifetime. Experts speak of epigenetic modifications. The methylations form certain patterns that can be used to estimate a person’s biological age.
With their analyses, the researchers were able to confirm that the stress of pregnancy is indeed reflected in a woman’s biological age: in a period of around 20 weeks between early and late pregnancy, it increased by an impressive two years. Apparently, the researchers say, pregnancy significantly accelerates aging – as work from Harvard Medical School had already suggested.
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However, O’Donnell and his team were surprised by another finding. Therefore, aging is not permanent. A few months after birth, the effect appears to be reversed, and to a considerable extent, the authors report.
“Three months after birth, we found a remarkable decline in biological age, in some individuals by as much as eight years,” comments O’Donnell. So while the period of pregnancy increases the biological age, there is a clear and pronounced recovery after the child is born.
A high body mass index in the mother before pregnancy has a negative impact on this recovery effect, according to another result of the study. In other words, women who were overweight before giving birth did not recover as significantly in biological age after giving birth. In contrast, breastfeeding resulted in a greater decline in maternal biological age within three months of birth.
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According to O’Donnell, these observations also offer new impulses for aging research. The physiological changes during and after pregnancy could provide insight into how people age overall and whether this can possibly be stopped or slowed down. However, it remains unclear whether the observed epigenetic aging and rejuvenation processes caused by pregnancy and birth are short-term or permanent effects.
It is therefore unclear how carrying and giving birth to a child affects a woman’s long-term health. It would also be important to find out what happens to the body during several consecutive pregnancies.
“So far, we don’t know whether the reduction in biological age after birth is simply due to the biological system just recovering,” O’Donnell notes. It is also conceivable that pregnancy actually rejuvenates the body overall.
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