Is It Harder on Your Body to Be Pregnant Again Too Soon After Birth
For older mothers, it tin feel like in that location's piddling time to waste before trying for another kid. But there are real risks linked to getting meaning over again likewise soon. Lauren Bates/Getty Images hide caption
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Lauren Bates/Getty Images
For older mothers, it tin can experience like there's little time to waste material before trying for another child. But there are real risks linked to getting pregnant once again too shortly.
Lauren Bates/Getty Images
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Many older showtime-time moms face a dilemma when information technology comes to baby No. 2. The clock is ticking louder than ever. But doctors advise waiting at least a year and a half after giving birth before conceiving over again.
This is the standard advice, based on multiple studies and public wellness guidelines. Just deciding when to try once more can be a difficult determination — weighing medical risk against infertility take chances. Now there are some new data points to factor in. A paper published Monday in the periodical JAMA Internal Medicine analyzed medical records from nearly 150,000 Canadian pregnancies to tease out how a mother's age influences the effects of a shorter-than-recommended interval between pregnancies.
For older moms in a hurry, the bad news is that the study adds evidence that conceiving within 12 months of a nascency does mean heightened health risks for both mother and child. But epidemiologist Laura Schummers, who led the inquiry while at Harvard and is now a post-doctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia, says there's good news for you here every bit well:
"The optimal spacing window that we found was 1 to two years after the commitment of i child until the conception of the next pregnancy," she says. "That'due south when we found the lowest chance for both mothers and babies." And, she adds, that'due south curt compared to some previous studies that had suggested the optimal wait was between xviii months and upwardly to v years.
Past inquiry has found a clear link between brusk "interpregnancy intervals" and increased risk of health problems for female parent and baby, including premature nascency. But why? The argue, Schummers says, revolves around whether the short interval is a directly biological cause of the risks, or whether it it is itself a result of other forces at work in the mother's life — for example, a lack of access to health care and unintended pregnancies.
Because older women are likelier to plan their pregnancies and have amend admission to care, Schummers and colleagues hypothesized that those mothers would non incur every bit much risk as younger women do if they had babies close together.
They found out they were incorrect.
"In fact," Schummers says, "we found that there were risks of adverse babe outcomes for women of all ages.
"The risks to the babies were higher amongst younger women, which was consistent with the team'south hypothesis. But risks to the mothers were higher among older women — indeed, only older mothers incurred higher risks to their own health past getting pregnant once again so soon.
Afterwards accounting for other factors that could drive these numbers, Schummers says, the stats shake out like this:
• For women 35 years or older who conceived simply vi months after a birth, six.2 per m experienced serious illness or injury, including death. Await 18 months and that run a risk dropped to 2.6 per per thousand. And then, pocket-sized absolute numbers only a dramatic divergence.
• A "severe adverse infant consequence" includes stillbirth and beingness born very early or very small. Among women ages 20 to 34, those who conceived after simply half-dozen months had twenty babies per k with those severe outcomes; the take a chance drops to 14 per 1000 amidst those who waited 18 months.
• Among women 35 years or older, there were 21 severe infant outcomes per thousand among those who waited just six months; the chance drops to eighteen per grand amidst those who waited 18 months.
"This shows you both the relationship between pregnancy spacing and the increased risk," Schummers says, "only also that older women tend to accept a higher baseline chance of many of these outcomes at all pregnancy spacing lengths."
The research turned up a similar blueprint for premature birth: A short pregnancy interval raises the hazard for all women, but particularly for younger women. The chance for them dropped from 53 per chiliad at a six-month interval to 32 per yard at an 18-month interval. For women over 35, the adventure dropped from l per k at six months to 36 per thousand afterward eighteen months.
It seems like mutual sense that a woman'due south trunk may need more than six months to fully recover from building a infant and giving birth, simply the actual mechanism behind the risks of short pregnancy intervals is non fully clear.
The leading theory, Schummers says, is that nutrients similar iron or folate could be depleted in the mother's body. But more than enquiry is needed to run across if that theory holds in developed countries like the United states and Canada, or if in that location are other mechanisms that accept not yet been identified.
For now, she says, her squad hopes these new findings can help women make decisions within their own personal contexts, and in consultation with their medical teams. The information may exist particularly helpful for older women, she says, considering they more often determine to have short pregnancy intervals on purpose.
"Then if you're making that kind of decision on purpose," she says, "it'due south easier to say, 'You lot know, let'due south wait another three months.' "
Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/11/01/663181674/how-long-should-older-moms-wait-before-getting-pregnant-again
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