Pregnancy may speed up 'biological aging,' study suggests

Women in their early 20s who have been pregnant are"biologically older" than those who have never been pregnant, and by some measures, this age gap seems to widen in people who have had multiple pregnancies, a new study suggests.

"What epigenetic clocks are doing is they're serving a predictive function rather than a sort of causal explanation," said first study author Calen Ryan, an associate research scientist in the Columbia Aging Center."They're trained to predict things that we think of as representing aspects of aging.

Across all of the clocks used, women who'd had at least one pregnancy showed accelerated aging compared with women with no pregnancy history, the analysis revealed; the pregnancies included those that resulted in miscarriages, stillbirths and live births. The pattern still showed up when the scientists controlled for other factors that also affect a person's rate of biological aging, such as socioeconomic status, smoking history and some genetic risk factors.

The team then looked at the 330 women they followed over time, to see if there were differences between the women's first and second blood samples. In that analysis, experiencing more pregnancies also was associated with faster aging compared with fewer pregnancies. However, this pattern showed up for only two of the six clocks — specifically the two designed to predict chronological age.

In addition,"these women are quite young at the time of the sample," Ryan said of the study participants. So it's not clear if women who are older at the time of their first pregnancy would show the same patterns. That said, it was helpful for the team to study young women because the researchers were trying to see if biological aging tied to pregnancy could be seen early, before the health outcomes of accelerated age show up.

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