Kids do make you age

HOW many times have you said to your kids, “You’ll give me more grey hairs!” or “You make me feel old”?

Well, you probably won’t be surprised to hear that having kids actually speeds up the ageing process.

A recent study performed by Northwestern University has revealed multiple pregnancies can cause women’s cells to age at a faster rate.

The study, led by Calen Ryan, Christopher Kuzawa and Dan Eisenberg, looked at two separate markers of cellular ageing in hundreds of women with varying reproductive histories.

“Telomere length and epigenetic age are cellular markers that independently predict mortality, and both appeared ‘older’ in women who had more pregnancies in their reproductive histories,” said Ryan, who is also a doctoral student in biological anthropology at Northwestern.

“Even after accounting for other factors that affect cellular ageing, the number of pregnancies still came out on top.” The actual numbers are quite surprising, with each additional pregnancy causing our cellular ageing to be accelerated by anywhere from six months to two years.

For someone who has been through three pregnancies, plus a third of another pregnancy, they are looking at a possible acceleration of more than 6½ years.

The study also revealed that pregnant women appeared younger in terms of epigenetic age.

So, when they are pregnant, they appear younger, but after having children, all that wonderful “pregnancy glow” takes them even further back than where they started.

“It’s an interesting situation in which pregnancy makes someone look temporarily ‘young,’ but there appears to be some lasting, cumulative relationship between the number of pregnancies and more accelerated biological age,” said Kuzawa, senior author of the study and a professor of anthropology at Northwestern.