Pregnancy May Increase Biological Age 2 Years - But Some End Up 'Younger'

Slashdot reader sciencehabit shared this report from Science magazine:

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...?

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...

The discovery that biological aging isn't necessarily a linear process 'came as a real surprise,' says Kieran O'Donnell, a perinatal researcher at the Yale School of Medicine... 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, says O'Donnell, 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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