Study reveals
Women are fertile longer
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After a certain age it is no longer so easy to have children – we all know that. But a US study now shows that the length of time women are fertile has increased.
It used to be quite normal to get married in your early twenties and start planning your family. But that has changed in the last few decades. Mothers are now older on average, and many women want to gain work experience before they have their first child. But you can already hear the biological clock ticking. After all, it is said that women over 30 have a harder time getting pregnant.
Recently, however, a comprehensive study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that found prolonged fertility.
Long-term study comes to a surprising result
The study spanned 60 years. A total of 7,773 American women aged 40 to 74 were surveyed between 1959 and 2018. In women surveyed between 1959 and 1962, the mean age at menopause was 48.4 years and the mean age at the first menstrual cycle was 13.5 years.
However, there has been a shift over the decades. Meanwhile, women are younger at their menarche (first menstrual period), but older at the onset of menopause: the average age at menopause for women surveyed between 2015 and 2018 was 49.9 years. Women from this period also reported having their first menstrual cycle when they average 12.7 years of age.
Women are fertile two years longer
The so-called “reproductive life span” is calculated as follows: the age at menarche is subtracted from the age at menopause. While this was 35 years at the beginning of the study, it has now increased to 37.1 years.
Researchers also found that participants who had experienced poverty, were smokers or were taking hormone therapy were more likely to start menopause at an earlier age and thus have a shorter reproductive life span.
“Sociodemographic, lifestyle and behavioral factors were significantly associated with natural menopausal age and reproductive life span. Other potential influencing factors could be improved access to health care, nutrition and environmental factors,” the study said.
Source used: ctvnews.ca