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Don't be reluctant to have more kids if you want to slow down the ageing process. A new study recently pointed out that number of children that a woman bears also affects the rate at which her body ages. As per the findings of the study, the women who bore more children exhibited longer telomeres, protective tips that are found at the end of every DNA strand and also are also symptomatic of cellular ageing. Telomeres that are long are crucial to the replication of cells and are related to longevity, says Indian Express.

For the purpose of the study, researchers assessed the number of children born to 75 women from two communities of rural Guatemala and also their telomere lengths. The telomere lengths of these participants was measured two times, 13 years apart, through buccal swabs and salivary specimen. "The findings contradict life history theory which predicts that producing a higher number of offspring accelerates the pace of biological aging," said Pablo Nepomnaschy, health sciences professor from Simon Fraser University, in a statement. "The slower pace of telomere shortening found in the participants who have more children, however, may be attributed to the dramatic increase in estrogen - a hormone produced during pregnancy," Nepomnaschy added, as reported by Tech Times.

The researchers swabbed the women's cheeks from inside to get their cell samples. However, Nepomnaschy said that according to previous research, the telomere length in different cells in the body manage to be alike. "If it's shorter or longer in one cell, it's probably shorter or longer in others," he says. After analyzing the cell samples, "we found a positive association between the number of children and longer telomeres," he says. The more children the women had, the longer the telomere, reported Yahoo News