Maternal aging linked to postpartum recovery window
Pregnancy transiently accelerates biological age across multiple measurement platforms, with the postpartum period functioning as a recovery window that partially reverses this acceleration.
Incomplete postpartum biological age recovery, driven by factors including body mass index, breastfeeding, and psychosocial stress, may produce persistent elevation that compounds across successive pregnancies.
Interpregnancy interval determines how much recovery occurs between pregnancies, providing a mechanistic basis for the inconsistent association between parity and long-term maternal mortality observed across cohorts.
Biological age dynamics offer a unifying account of interpregnancy interval epidemiology that existing frameworks, such as maternal nutritional depletion, cannot fully explain, and they generate falsifiable predictions testable in existing longitudinal cohorts.
https://www.cell.com/trends/endocrinology-metabolism/fulltext/S1043-2760(26)00241-9
