What you probably already know: For years, scientists have shown that a person’s biological age tends to go up during pregnancy and the returns to baseline during the postpartum period. But little has been done to determine how the length of time between pregnancies — and the resulting recovery period — affect’s a mother’s longterm health. Researchers have had a hard time determining whether the changes to brain structure and DNA that happen during pregnancy were caused by biological, behavioral or genetic factors — or whether it was a specific mix of all of them. However, new research points to a critical time in pregnancy that may be responsible for a large part of these effects on health and lifespan — postpartum recovery.
Why? “Since pregnancy elevates biological age and the postpartum period represents a window during which biological age recovers, then the length of that window may be critically important,” said Dr. Jesse Poganik, a physician at Mass General Brigham and lead author of the study that found these correlations. The study came to three main conclusions: That biological age does recover during postpartum rest, recovery can take anywhere between a few months to more than a year, and that becoming pregnant during the recovery period can halt the process.
What it means: “Based on this, we propose that the interval between pregnancies may be a missing piece in explaining the link between number of children and later-life health,” Poganik said. “This remains a hypothesis, and testing it directly will require studies that follow women for decades beyond their childbearing years.” If researchers can continue to hone in on how a mother’s body changes during the process of pregnancy, they might be able to help extend women’s lifespans.
What happens now? Mass Brigham General plans to use new technology to monitor the biological age of individual organs over the course of pregnancy and in the years following to build a more comprehensive understanding of how postpartum recovery might directly affect the body. The aim, Poganik said, is to create future guidance on pregnancy spacing so parents can use it to inform their decisions. The World Health Organization currently recommends waiting at least two years between pregnancies.
