It turns out that childbirth makes the cells of our body age faster.
After a child appears in your life, your life (and you yourself) will never be the same. But we didn’t think that the changes were so global. It has always been believed that childbirth rejuvenates a woman’s body. However, one of the latest studies by American scientists refutes this postulate.
A team of experts led by epidemiologist Anna Pollack from George Mason University studied data on the health of 4,2 women of childbearing age. These data included genetic studies. Scientists analyzed the state of genetic markers called telomeres – these are sections of DNA that protect genetic information. The longer the telomeres, the younger a person is at the cellular level. And the shorter, the higher the likelihood of a person developing oncological and cardiovascular diseases, and a decrease in cognitive functions. So, women who have already learned the joy of motherhood had shorter telomeres than their nulliparous “colleagues” in the study, by an average of 11 percent. Translated into years – about XNUMX years.
“This is just an amazing result,” – with surprise .
Amazing – because childbirth accelerates aging about as much as smoking. It shortens telomeres by an average of 4,8 percent. Obesity, by the way, shortens these parts of the genome by 8,8 percent.
Of course, the number of children also matters. More babies – shorter telomeres. It turns out that the degree of cellular aging is also higher.
“It turned out that the shortest telomeres were in women who had five children. There were no mothers with even more children in our study, ”said Anna Pollak.
Why this happens, scientists do not know. So far, they have only been able to establish a link between the number of children and the level of cellular aging. One of the assumptions is that this is due to the stress level associated with raising children. The more babies there are, the higher the stress level.
“We are not saying that you should not have children, in any case. We’re not drawing any conclusions yet, ”says Dr. Pollack.
However, this is not the only study that suggests biological aging is accelerating after childbirth. True, the numbers were different: the cells of the mothers were older than the cells of their nulliparous peers, by 3-4,5 years. And only one study found that the body of a woman-mother is better protected from cellular aging than the body of a nulliparous girl. The analysis was conducted in Guatemala in one of the Mayan rural communities. Therefore, we have every right not to trust this study.