Body’s cells appear to age faster during pregnancy, but they might recover—and even thrive—in the months after birth
and can cause serious health complications such as hypertension and preeclampsia. But does being pregnant actually take years off your life?, scientists report that the stress of pregnancy can cause a person’s biological age to increase by up to 2 years—a trend that. In some cases, the authors write, those who breastfeed their children after giving birth may end up biologically “younger” than during early pregnancy.
Factors such as genetics, stress, and diet can all affect the so-called biological age of different organs, cells, and tissues. That age, whichknown as epigenetic “clocks,” may be different from a person’s chronological one. When an organ is classified as substantially “older” than a person’s actual age, it usually means it has accumulated damage at a faster rate—often
Just as the Gladyshev team had done, O’Donnell and his collaborators strove to tease out signs of epigenetic modification in the cells of pregnant people. In particular, they focused on a process known as DNA methylation, in which molecules called methyl groups are added to different genes, often changing the way they are expressed.
But blood samples from 68 participants, collected 3 months after giving birth, revealed a dramatic about-face. Although being pregnant had initially aged their cells between 1 and 2 years, O’Donnell says, their biological age now appeared to be 3 to 8 years younger than it had been during early pregnancy—with different epigenetic clocks algorithms providing slightly bigger or smaller estimates.
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