Pregnancy 'can improve health': Having a baby could have 'rejuvenating effect' and slow down ageing process, say scientists

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Expectant mums really do bloom - for being pregnant has a ‘rejuvenating effect’ on women, according to new scientific research.
And for older women it could help them feel young again, almost literally, as pregnancy helps regenerate tissue and slow down the ageing process, it added.
Appearing to bloom is not just a cosmetic side effect of carrying a child, said medical experts for the journal Fertility and Sterility but an actual physical process.
Researchers studied the effects of liver transplants on pregnant and non-pregnant mice using a high-tech MRI scanner at the Hadassah Medical School in Jerusalem.
It found in young, non-pregnant mice, 82 per cent of the liver had regenerated after two days and in older, non-pregnant mice, only 46 per cent had regenerated in that time.
But in older, pregnant mice around 96 per cent had regenerated after two days, better than the non-pregnant rodents both young and old, they reported.
They also found that pregnancy protected the rodents from tissue damage around the heart, which is also an irreversible part of the human ageing process, said the study.
Pregnancy is a unique condition for the human body, said the researchers, and as a result it has to cope with two people’s systems at the same time.
For the older of the two bodies, it is as if it has been injected with a youth serum from the baby it is carrying, hence the rejuvenating process affecting the mother, it suggests.
The report 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, Rubin Chair in Medical Science at Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical School, who led the review, has also done research that suggests that pregnancy can restore the mother’s muscles’ ability to regenerate.
The research found, in the mice used to test their hypothesis, that the positive effect of pregnancy was ‘transient’ and lasted for about two months after delivery.

Previous research has also found that old mice given a transfusion of younger mice’s blood performed better in a memory task than those that aged naturally.
A study by Stanford University found that changes in the make-up of people’s blood as they age may damage connections in the brain and so cause memory deterioration and the decline of other brain functions.
This could be tackled by filtering more youthful blood into the older body, which would rejuvenate old tissue and keep nerve cells in better working order, according to the research.

the source: dailymail.co.uk/health/article-3032882/Pregnancy-improve-health-Having-baby-rejuvenating-effect-slow-ageing-process-say-scientists.html
 
Well, perhaps so, but you get all that aging back when the little darlings become teenagers!
 
Pregnancy also uses up a lot of vitamins and minerals, so you can get aged badly if you aren’t eating right!

(It used to be standard for women to lose teeth during pregnancy, in areas where women didn’t get enough calcium in their diets. Their calcium would get leeched from their teeth and bones to make sure the baby had enough. That’s why pregnant women now take those huge pregnancy calcium and vitamin pills.)
 
I know not all women love being pregnant, and I don’t, during the first trimester. But I always feel *awesome *during the second and even most of the third. Plus my hair and nails look fabulous, and my skin looks pretty good, too (a few more zits thanks to that “glow,” but nothing that coverup can’t handle). There’s definitely a difference between pregnant and not pregnant (well, until 3-6 months postpartum) with that kind of stuff, and I have taken prenatal vitamins constantly for almost five years. So I know it’s not *just *the vitamins.

This is interesting. I already know that not cycling constantly lowers the risks of certain cancers. I am not surprised that being pregnant would offer health benefits to mom, considering that for most of human history it would be expected that most women would be pregnant fairly often until they hit menopause.
 
Good news for my youngest whom I had at 44. She needs her mom around for a long time. 🙂
 
I wonder how many of these scientists have spent a majority of their late 20s and early 30s either pregnant or nursing and running after a string of toddlers and preschoolers.

I hate being pregnant.

I absolutely hate the way my body feels when I hit the last part of the second and the entirety of the third trimester.

I’m blessed in the sense that I don’t get sick and I never feel sick. I feel like my normal self without having to worry about menstruation and it is nice. But the first trimester is short lived and I start feeling horrible around the middle of the second.

I’m in a ton of pain, my hips and back hurt all the time and it makes it hard to walk, I’m tired all the time, I have awful heartburn and I also have Gestational Diabetes and other complications which means more time spent in doctor’s offices, more blood drawn, more tests and more and more feeling like a petri dish and not a real person who just happens to be pregnant.

I had a doctor tell me today that pregnancy is not a disease…I wanted to yell back at her and say “then leave me ALONE!”
Stop ordering all of these nonsense tests, ultra-sounds, blood work and extra appointments. Stop making me drink that awful glucose stuff that makes me sick, stop hooking me up to machines for stress tests and forcing me to miss school and figure out baby sitters so I can make all of these extra appointments.

The stress is not healthy at all.

But yeah…I look great. My skin clears up, my hair is full and I glow. Plus, I gain almost no weight…I get a beach ball belly and nothing else.

So, outward appearances hint I’m healthy and happy. Inside, I’m hating every second of it and just want it to be over with so I can hold my baby and be rid of all of the extra issues I have to deal with.

I don’t want to be pregnant ever again.
I wish I didn’t have to go through pregnancy to have my babies. Where is that stupid stork when you need him!
 
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