When Is It Healthy to Try Getting Pregenant Again
For older mothers, information technology can feel similar there's little time to waste material before trying for another child. But there are real risks linked to getting pregnant again too soon. Lauren Bates/Getty Images hide caption
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Lauren Bates/Getty Images
For older mothers, it can feel like there's little time to waste material before trying for another kid. But there are existent risks linked to getting meaning once again likewise soon.
Lauren Bates/Getty Images
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Many older first-fourth dimension moms face a dilemma when information technology comes to infant 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 again.
This is the standard advice, based on multiple studies and public health guidelines. Just deciding when to attempt again can be a difficult decision — weighing medical risk against infertility risk. Now there are some new data points to cistron in. A newspaper published Monday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine analyzed medical records from nearly 150,000 Canadian pregnancies to tease out how a female parent'due south age influences the effects of a shorter-than-recommended interval between pregnancies.
For older moms in a bustle, the bad news is that the study adds prove that conceiving within 12 months of a nativity does mean heightened health risks for both mother and kid. Just epidemiologist Laura Schummers, who led the research while at Harvard and is now a post-doctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia, says there's good news for you hither as well:
"The optimal spacing window that we found was one to two years after the commitment of i child until the conception of the next pregnancy," she says. "That's when we found the everyman risk for both mothers and babies." And, she adds, that'southward short compared to some previous studies that had suggested the optimal wait was betwixt 18 months and upwards to five years.
Past research has establish a clear link between short "interpregnancy intervals" and increased risk of health problems for female parent and baby, including premature nativity. Simply why? The fence, Schummers says, revolves around whether the short interval is a direct biological crusade of the risks, or whether it it is itself a result of other forces at piece of work in the mother's life — for example, a lack of access to wellness care and unintended pregnancies.
Considering older women are likelier to plan their pregnancies and have ameliorate access to care, Schummers and colleagues hypothesized that those mothers would not incur equally much gamble as younger women practise if they had babies close together.
They constitute out they were wrong.
"In fact," Schummers says, "we constitute that there were risks of agin baby outcomes for women of all ages.
"The risks to the babies were higher amidst younger women, which was consistent with the team's hypothesis. Simply risks to the mothers were college among older women — indeed, simply older mothers incurred college risks to their ain health by getting pregnant again and then before long.
After 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 only six months subsequently a birth, 6.two per chiliad experienced serious affliction or injury, including death. Wait 18 months and that hazard dropped to 2.vi per per thousand. And then, small absolute numbers but a dramatic departure.
• A "severe agin infant issue" includes stillbirth and being built-in very early or very small-scale. Among women ages 20 to 34, those who conceived later just six months had twenty babies per m with those severe outcomes; the gamble drops to xiv per 1000 among those who waited 18 months.
• Among women 35 years or older, there were 21 severe infant outcomes per chiliad among those who waited only six months; the hazard drops to 18 per thousand amongst those who waited 18 months.
"This shows yous both the relationship betwixt pregnancy spacing and the increased risk," Schummers says, "but also that older women tend to accept a higher baseline risk of many of these outcomes at all pregnancy spacing lengths."
The inquiry turned upward a similar pattern for premature nascence: A short pregnancy interval raises the risk for all women, but especially for younger women. The risk for them dropped from 53 per m at a six-month interval to 32 per thousand at an xviii-month interval. For women over 35, the take a chance dropped from 50 per thousand at six months to 36 per thousand subsequently xviii months.
Information technology seems like common sense that a woman'due south trunk may need more than six months to fully recover from building a baby and giving birth, just the actual mechanism backside the risks of short pregnancy intervals is non fully articulate.
The leading theory, Schummers says, is that nutrients like fe or folate could be depleted in the mother's trunk. But more than research is needed to see if that theory holds in developed countries like the United States and Canada, or if there are other mechanisms that have not yet been identified.
For now, she says, her squad hopes these new findings tin can help women make decisions within their own personal contexts, and in consultation with their medical teams. The data may be peculiarly helpful for older women, she says, because they more often decide 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 know, permit's look another iii 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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