Pregnancy ‘can improve health’

IT is well known that pregnant women often give off a healthy glow.

But this could be more than skin-deep – as carrying a baby may actually improve their health, research suggests.

Pregnancy could have a ‘rejuvenating effect’ on women, helping to regenerate tissue and slow down the aging process, the scientists said.

Studying the results of liver transplants in mice, they found that for non-pregnant rodents, 82 per cent of the liver had regenerated after two days in younger mice and 46 per cent in older ones.

But in older, pregnant mice around 96 per cent had regenerated in that time – better than non-pregnant rodents both young and old. The team, from the Hebrew University Hadassah Medical School in Jerusalem, also found that pregnancy protected the rodents from heart tissue damage.

In pregnancy, the mother has to manage the baby’s bodily systems as well as her own, and some of their blood supply is shared. And the scientists suggest that it is as if the mother is injected with a youth serum from her baby, leading to the rejuvenating effects.

Although the study was on mice, it is thought that similar effects could be seen with humans. The researchers’ report, published in the journal Fertility and Sterility, added: ‘As we age, it is more difficult for our tissue to regenerate itself.

‘Because pregnancy is a unique biological model of a partially shared blood system, we have speculated that pregnancy would have a rejuvenating effect on the mother.’

Tal Falick Michaeli, who led the review, has also done research that suggests pregnancy can restore the ability of a mother’s muscles to regenerate. In tests again on mice, he found that the benefits were ‘transient’ and lasted for about two months after delivery.

And a study by Stanford University in the US found that giving old mice a transfusion of a younger mouse’s blood helped them to perform better in a memory task than those who aged naturally.