Researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School and Duke University tracked epigenetic markers of biological age in pregnant mice and pregnant women and found it rose during pregnancy, then fell back after birth.
Vadim Gladyshev's team used several epigenetic clocks, which estimate biological age from chemical marks on DNA, in pregnant mice and in existing data from several groups of pregnant women. Age climbed through pregnancy in both, then dropped back toward baseline within weeks of birth in mice and in the one human group followed after delivery.
The reversal suggests biological age is not a fixed, one-way clock but something that can shift up and down in response to major physiological stress and then recover. Other stressors tested by the same group showed a similar pattern of rising and then falling biological age. How consistent the postpartum recovery is across different pregnancies, and what shapes how fully it happens, remain active questions.
Read the original study
Poganik et al., Cell Metabolism, 2023 · doi.org/10.1016/j.cmet.2023.03.015
The aging from pregnancy came back off.
Source
- Poganik, J. R., Zhang, B., Baht, G. S., Tyshkovskiy, A., Deik, A., Kerepesi, C., Yim, S. H., Lu, A. T., Haghani, A., Gong, T., Hedman, A. M., Andolf, E., Pershagen, G., Almqvist, C., Clish, C. B., Horvath, S., White, J. P., & Gladyshev, V. N. (2023). Biological age is increased by stress and restored upon recovery. Cell Metabolism, 35(5), 807–820.e5. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cmet.2023.03.015