Women who have kids after 33 are twice as likely to live to 95 or older than those who stopped having babies before age 30, a new Boston University School of Medicine study found.
“Of course this does not mean women should wait to have children at older ages in order to improve their own chances of living longer,” study co-author Thomas Perls, a professor of medicine at BU said. “The natural ability to have a child at an older age likely indicates that a woman’s reproductive system is aging slowly, and therefore so is the rest of her body.”
Researchers of the study published in the journal Menopause said the link exists because gene variations that enable women to have babies by natural means at a later age may also be tied to living longer lives.
“If a woman has those variants, she is able to reproduce and bear children for a longer period of time, increasing her chances of passing down those genes to the next generation,” Perls said.
This is the last of a series of studies that netted similar findings. An earlier study from the New England Centenarian Study found that women who had children after the age of 40 were four times more likely to live to 100 than women who had their last child at a younger age.