How Soon After Getting Pregnant Can You Get Pregnant Again
For older mothers, it tin can experience like in that location's little time to waste material before trying for another child. But there are real risks linked to getting pregnant again too presently. Lauren Bates/Getty Images hide caption
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Lauren Bates/Getty Images
For older mothers, information technology can feel like there's little fourth dimension to waste before trying for another child. But there are existent risks linked to getting significant once more too before long.
Lauren Bates/Getty Images
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Many older first-time moms face a dilemma when it comes to baby No. 2. The clock is ticking louder than e'er. But doctors suggest waiting at to the lowest degree a year and a half after giving birth before conceiving again.
This is the standard advice, based on multiple studies and public health guidelines. But deciding when to try again can be a difficult conclusion — weighing medical adventure against infertility risk. Now there are some new information points to gene 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 furnishings of a shorter-than-recommended interval between pregnancies.
For older moms in a bustle, the bad news is that the study adds evidence that conceiving within 12 months of a birth does mean heightened health risks for both female parent and kid. Merely epidemiologist Laura Schummers, who led the research while at Harvard and is now a post-doctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia, says in that location'due south good news for you hither as well:
"The optimal spacing window that nosotros found was one to two years after the delivery of one kid until the formulation of the next pregnancy," she says. "That'due south when we found the lowest adventure for both mothers and babies." And, she adds, that's short compared to some previous studies that had suggested the optimal wait was between xviii months and up to five years.
Past inquiry has found a clear link between short "interpregnancy intervals" and increased take a chance of health issues for mother and baby, including premature birth. But why? The debate, Schummers says, revolves around whether the short interval is a direct biological cause of the risks, or whether it it is itself a result of other forces at work in the mother's life — for case, a lack of admission to health intendance and unintended pregnancies.
Because older women are likelier to plan their pregnancies and have better access to intendance, Schummers and colleagues hypothesized that those mothers would not incur as much run a risk as younger women do if they had babies shut together.
They plant out they were wrong.
"In fact," Schummers says, "nosotros constitute that there were risks of agin infant outcomes for women of all ages.
"The risks to the babies were higher amongst younger women, which was consequent with the team's hypothesis. But risks to the mothers were college among older women — indeed, only older mothers incurred higher risks to their own health by getting pregnant again so soon.
Later 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 merely six months afterwards a nascency, half dozen.two per thousand experienced serious illness or injury, including expiry. Look 18 months and that run a risk dropped to 2.half dozen per per thousand. So, pocket-size absolute numbers but a dramatic difference.
• A "severe adverse baby outcome" includes stillbirth and beingness built-in very early on or very small. Among women ages 20 to 34, those who conceived later just six months had 20 babies per thousand with those astringent outcomes; the risk drops to 14 per thousand among those who waited 18 months.
• Amid women 35 years or older, there were 21 astringent baby outcomes per thousand amid those who waited just half-dozen months; the risk drops to 18 per thou among those who waited 18 months.
"This shows y'all both the relationship betwixt pregnancy spacing and the increased run a risk," Schummers says, "merely also that older women tend to take a college baseline risk of many of these outcomes at all pregnancy spacing lengths."
The research turned up a similar pattern for premature nativity: A short pregnancy interval raises the risk for all women, but particularly for younger women. The hazard for them dropped from 53 per thousand at a six-calendar month interval to 32 per m at an 18-month interval. For women over 35, the risk dropped from 50 per k at vi months to 36 per thousand subsequently eighteen months.
Information technology seems like common sense that a woman's body may need more than than half dozen months to fully recover from building a baby and giving birth, but the bodily mechanism backside the risks of short pregnancy intervals is non fully clear.
The leading theory, Schummers says, is that nutrients like iron or folate could be depleted in the female parent's body. Simply 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 take not all the same been identified.
For now, she says, her team hopes these new findings can aid women make decisions within their own personal contexts, and in consultation with their medical teams. The data may be specially helpful for older women, she says, considering they more often decide to take short pregnancy intervals on purpose.
"And then if you're making that kind of determination on purpose," she says, "it's easier to say, 'You know, let's 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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