Pregnancy may increase biological age by 2 years —though some people end up ‘younger’

Pregnancy is the ultimate stress test. Nurturing a growing fetus requires a series of profound physical, hormonal, and chemical changes that may rewire every major organ in the body and can cause serious health complications such as hypertension and preeclampsia. But does being pregnant actually take years off your life? According to the results of a new study, it just might. Today in Cell Metabolism , scientists report that the stress of pregnancy can cause a person’s biological age to increase by up to 2 years—a trend that may reverse itself in the months that follow . In some cases, the authors write, those who breastfeed their children after giving birth may end up biologically “younger” than during early pregnancy. The finding represents yet another piece of “compelling” evidence that events during and after pregnancy can have far-reaching health consequences, says Elizabeth Bertone-Johnson, an epidemiologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who wasn’t involved in the new study. Intriguing signs of accelerated aging during pregnancy emerged last year. Researchers at Harvard Medical School—led by biomedical scientist Vadim Gladyshev—collected blood samples from pregnant individuals and examined the samples for subtle changes known as epigenetic modifications, which affect the way genes work without directly altering the underlying DNA sequence. Their results, which were also published in ...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news