Women And Having Babies After 35

A lot of women are having babies later in life – and that’s a good thing – for their brains! New research found having a baby after age 35 helped women better preserve their memory later in life. The study was published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society… and it found women who gave birth after age 35 had better memory skills in their 50s and beyond – than women who’d had their babies prior to age 35.

It’s already known that motherhood comes with a mental boost from the hormones that flood the body during pregnancy, improving cognitive function. And when the Yale-New Haven Hospital took high-resolution MRIs of women’s brains months after they gave birth, they saw the mothers’ gray matter had increased in volume. And it increased the most in areas that control emotional processing, sensory perception, reasoning, and judgment.

So when women have babies later in life, that mental boost propels them to have a stronger cognitive function at an older age, simply because the boost was more recent.