How Long Do I Wait Until Pregnant Again
For older mothers, it tin can feel similar there's trivial time to waste matter before trying for another kid. 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 tin can feel like there's trivial time to waste before trying for another child. But there are real risks linked to getting pregnant again too before long.
Lauren Bates/Getty Images
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Many older showtime-fourth dimension moms face a dilemma when it comes to baby No. ii. The clock is ticking louder than e'er. But doctors advise waiting at to the lowest degree a twelvemonth and a half later on giving birth before conceiving once again.
This is the standard advice, based on multiple studies and public wellness guidelines. But deciding when to try again can be a hard decision — weighing medical risk against infertility risk. Now there are some new information points to factor in. A newspaper published Mon in the periodical JAMA Internal Medicine analyzed medical records from nigh 150,000 Canadian pregnancies to tease out how a mother'due south age influences the furnishings of a shorter-than-recommended interval between pregnancies.
For older moms in a bustle, the bad news is that the report adds evidence that conceiving inside 12 months of a nascence does mean heightened health risks for both mother and kid. Only epidemiologist Laura Schummers, who led the inquiry while at Harvard and is now a post-doctoral fellow at the Academy of British Columbia, says there'southward adept news for you here as well:
"The optimal spacing window that nosotros establish was one to ii years afterwards the delivery of one child until the conception of the next pregnancy," she says. "That'southward when nosotros 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 18 months and up to five years.
Past research has found a clear link between short "interpregnancy intervals" and increased risk of health problems for mother and baby, including premature birth. Simply why? The debate, Schummers says, revolves around whether the curt 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 example, a lack of access to health care 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 non incur equally much risk as younger women practise if they had babies close together.
They establish out they were wrong.
"In fact," Schummers says, "we plant that there were risks of adverse infant outcomes for women of all ages.
"The risks to the babies were higher among younger women, which was consistent with the team'southward hypothesis. But risks to the mothers were college among older women — indeed, but older mothers incurred college risks to their own health by getting pregnant once again then soon.
Later bookkeeping for other factors that could drive these numbers, Schummers says, the stats shake out similar this:
• For women 35 years or older who conceived just six months after a birth, 6.2 per thousand experienced serious affliction or injury, including death. Wait 18 months and that risk dropped to 2.6 per per thousand. So, minor absolute numbers just a dramatic difference.
• A "astringent adverse infant consequence" includes stillbirth and beingness born very early or very small. Among women ages 20 to 34, those who conceived after merely half dozen months had 20 babies per thousand with those severe outcomes; the adventure drops to 14 per chiliad among those who waited xviii months.
• Among women 35 years or older, there were 21 severe infant outcomes per thousand amid those who waited merely six months; the risk drops to xviii per thou among those who waited 18 months.
"This shows you both the human relationship between pregnancy spacing and the increased run a risk," Schummers says, "but also that older women tend to have a higher baseline adventure of many of these outcomes at all pregnancy spacing lengths."
The research turned up a similar design for premature birth: A short pregnancy interval raises the risk for all women, but peculiarly for younger women. The risk for them dropped from 53 per thousand at a six-calendar month interval to 32 per thousand at an 18-month interval. For women over 35, the risk dropped from fifty per thousand at vi months to 36 per one thousand afterward xviii months.
Information technology seems like common sense that a woman'southward trunk may need more than than six months to fully recover from building a babe and giving birth, simply the actual mechanism behind the risks of brusque pregnancy intervals is non fully articulate.
The leading theory, Schummers says, is that nutrients like iron or folate could be depleted in the mother'due south body. But more than inquiry is needed to see if that theory holds in developed countries like the Usa and Canada, or if there are other mechanisms that have not yet been identified.
For now, she says, her team hopes these new findings tin assist women make decisions within their own personal contexts, and in consultation with their medical teams. The information may be peculiarly helpful for older women, she says, considering they more than often decide to take short pregnancy intervals on purpose.
"And and then if you're making that kind of conclusion on purpose," she says, "it'southward easier to say, 'Yous 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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