Oh baby.
Pregnancy can come with a lot of ups — a brand new bundle of joy — and downs, like complications and even the possibility of premature birth.
But there is one upside to women who get pregnant at certain ages, and it could not only add years to their lives but also improve their health in a big way.
While being pregnant does age women and giving birth can turn back the clock, conceiving at a particular age range affects women’s lifespan and biological aging.
Unlike chronological age, which is the number of years we’ve been alive, biological aging measures the age of our cells and organs. It’s influenced by factors like genetics, lifestyle, environmental exposures and diet.
Research from the University of Helsinki and the Minerva Foundation Institute for Medical Research found that women who became pregnant between 24 and 38 saw more favorable aging and longevity patterns.
Published in the journal Nature Communications, the study looked at nearly 15,000 Finnish twins who had completed a questionnaire in 1975 and had their life course followed up to the present.
From the follow-up, women with two to three children lived the longest.
The research also found that mothers of large families, as well as women who had their first child at a very young age, appeared to age somewhat faster.
This suggests that both the number of children and the timing of pregnancies have an impact on women’s adult health and life expectancy.
This could be due to the amount of energy and resources pregnancy takes.
“Organisms have limited resources such as time and energy,” said doctoral researcher and study lead Mikaela Hukkanen. “When a large amount of energy is invested in reproduction, it is taken away from bodily maintenance and repair mechanisms, which could reduce lifespan.”
The average age of women having their first child in the US has been steadily increasing over the years and reached 27.5 years in 2023, according to the CDC.
Having more than four children led to a shorter lifespan and faster biological aging, or the deterioration of cells and tissue.
However, women who had never given birth showed faster aging than those with a few kids, which may be explained by other lifestyle or health-related factors.
While being pregnant can age a woman by about two years, it turns out giving birth can also reverse her biological age by 8 years, according to a study from the Yale Child Study Center published in Cell Metabolism.
But not all women had the same postpartum recovery, as those who could be classified as obese and who had a higher body mass index (BMI) before pregnancy didn’t age in reverse as much as women with a lower BMI.
According to one of the study’s lead scientists, there could be potential risks for the women who either had a lot of pregnancies or none at all.
“A person who is biologically older than their calendar age is at a higher risk of death,” said study lead, Dr. Miina Ollikainen. “Our results show that life history choices leave a lasting biological imprint that can be measured long before old age.”
