How many children is it possible to have in a life time

His first wife — whose name is lost to history — holds the widely cited world record for bearing the most children. According to a local monastery's report to the government in Moscow, between and Mrs Vassilyev popped out 16 pairs of twins, seven sets of triplets and four sets of quadruplets, over 27 separate labours. The grand total: 69 children. You can only imagine how a present-day newspaper editor would react to such fecundity, especially given the tabloid clamour in recent years over octuplet mother Nadya "Octomom" Suleman , who has 14 children, or the Radford family in Britain , which has 16 kids — and a TV show.

I mean, 69 kids? I decided to dig a bit deeper into this astonishing — and seemingly dubious — claim, by consulting reproduction experts. My hope was to discover the fundamental limits to how many children a woman could ever naturally have. But along the way, I also discovered that if you take modern science into account, a woman could, in theory, become the mother to more children than we ever thought possible. In the UK, only around 1. Would she have had enough time for 27 pregnancies in the 40 year-span that is claimed?

Initially, the answer appears to be yes, especially if you take into account the fact that triplets and quadruplets are usually birthed after shorter-than-average terms.

Some rough calculations: 16 twins times 37 weeks; seven triplets times 32 weeks; four quadruplets times 30 weeks. Add it up, and Mrs Vassilyev would have been pregnant for 18 years of the 40 years — half of the time, or two-decades-worth of craving pickles and ice cream. For starters, could she have been fertile enough over such a long time period? Women typically go through menarche at around age 15, when their ovaries begin releasing usually a single egg every 28 days. This ovulation continues until the egg supply, insofar as we know, is exhausted at menopause, the typical onset of which is 51 years of age.

Most women don't get pregnant past their mid-forties, so would there be enough time to have 69 children? Credit: Getty Images. Well before menopause, though, women's fertility plummets. As women get older, egg quantity and quality diminish. Halfway through fetal development, unborn females have as many as seven million immature egg cells, but they are born with closer to only one million eggs. Only a few hundred thousand eggs then persist into adulthood.

And of these legions, technically known as follicles, something like ever mature and eventually ovulate, assuming a year span of potential childbearing. The last of these eggs, ovulated late in a woman's fertility window, have far higher chances of accruing damage and mutations, such as chromosomal abnormalities. Many pregnancies with these atypical eggs self-terminate. Thus, our definition of parity should be interpreted in the context of births surviving at least into early childhood.

The lack of information regarding pregnancy history precluded our ability to look at additional variables such as total pregnancies, all live births, etc.

We also based our analysis on number of children not number of births as the independent variable. Results were unchanged when mothers with twins were removed from the analysis. In summary, our data reveal a positive correlation between number of offspring and life span. The correlation may be an indirect one, arising from the fact that healthy individuals are more likely to have large numbers of offspring and to experience a longer life span.

The positive correlation observed is mediated by factors associated with the age at last birth among women but not men. Further understanding of these factors may improve our understanding of the biological and social mechanisms underlying successful aging. Average age of death and 95 percent confidence interval by number of children.

Trend line given by unadjusted linear regression. Secondary axis gives sample size. Trend lines represent piecewise linear regression with one knot and smooth polynomial model as described in text. Predicted effect on average life span conditional on age at last birth for Old Order Amish mothers who lived to at least age 50 years and were born between and by the number of children, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

Piecewise linear regression was fit with two inflection points, at 7 and 14 children. Number of children and the risk of obesity in older women.

Prev Med. The effect of parity on the later development of non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus or impaired glucose tolerance.

N Engl J Med. Number of pregnancies and the subsequent risk of cardiovascular disease. Kirkwood TBL. Evolution of ageing. Evolution of senescence: late survival sacrificed for reproduction. Voland E, Engel C. Is the postmenopausal-age-at-death variable a fitness-maximizing reproductive strategy?

Anthropol Anz. Fertility and life span: late children enhance female longevity. J Gerontol Biol Sci. Borgerhoff Mulder M.

Reproductive success in three Kipsigis cohorts. In: Clutton-Brock TH, ed. Human longevity at the cost of reproductive success. Fertility and post-reproductive longevity. Soc Biol. Longevity and the costs of reproduction in a historical human population.

Doblhammer G. Reproductive history and mortality later in life: a comparative study of England and Wales and Austria.

Popul Stud Camb. Doblhammer G, Oeppen J. Reproduction and longevity among the British peerage: the effect of frailty and health selection. Heritability of life span in the Old Order Amish. Am J Med Genet. Cross HE. Population studies and the Old Order Amish. Comparison of methods for survival analysis of dependent data.

Genet Epidemiol. Hum Biol. Software for constructing and verifying pedigrees within large genealogies and an application to the Old Order Amish of Lancaster County. Genome Res. Beiler K. Fisher Family History. The familial component in longevity. A study of offspring of nonagenarians.

Preliminary analysis of the completed study. Johns Hopkins Med J. Philippe P. Familial correlations of longevity: an isolate-based study. The heritability of human longevity: a population-based study of Danish twin pairs born — Hum Genet. Familial excess longevity in Utah genealogies. Almasy L, Blangero J. Multipoint quantitative-trait linkage analysis in general pedigrees. Am J Hum Genet. Kleinbaum DG. In order to explain this finding, we postulate that postreproductive life extension is triggered by late births and the associated presence of young children in the postreproductive period.

We show that the data in fact confirm that specifically the presence of young children, or equivalently, late timing of the last birth, is associated with increased postreproductive longevity. Our findings thus support the reproductive potential hypothesis, which holds that life-span regulation has evolved in such a way as to maximize individual reproductive success. When the relations between fertility and longevity for women are investigated, it is desirable to study cohorts with high average fertility.

This excludes many modern cohorts, but it is an important prerequisite when the upper ranges of human fertility are studied. Highly fertile cohorts will allow one to observe a large range of variation in individual fertility, especially late fertility, and will bring the observations closer to presumed precontraceptive patterns. For these reasons, it is preferable to use well-documented data on a historical cohort. An ideal cohort would be narrowly positioned in space and time so as to minimize confounding and biases caused by changes in reproductive patterns that may occur over time or space.

Such changes are notoriously hard to control and may have contributed to methodological problems in previous reports on the relation between fertility and longevity, such as those that occurred in the study by Westendorp and Kirkwood 3.

Accordingly, we use data from a well-documented 17th- to 18th-century prebirth control cohort of native-born French-Canadian women. Dates of birth and death of the women and birth dates of their children are based on church records and are deemed reliable.

Further details on this cohort and the nature of the data can be found in the report by Le Bourg and colleagues 10 ; also see the study by Nault and colleagues For other examples detailing the demography and interpretation of historical cohorts, we refer to Bideau 12 and Knodel Mortality and longevity are studied exclusively in the postreproductive period past age Postreproductive longevity is defined as remaining life expectancy past age Some characteristic features of this sample are described in the next section.

The statistical methods used include Cox proportional hazards regression for remaining lifetimes In addition, we use nonparametric curve estimation techniques. Such methods let the data speak for themselves and do not impose requirements and shape restrictions typically needed for parametric modeling. Such restrictions would be difficult to meet given the complex structure of density and hazard functions mortality rates that we observe for these data.

It is remarkable that of the women in this cohort, These numbers clearly demonstrate that this cohort is useful for studying the effects of higher-end fertility on longevity. A bar chart demonstrating the distribution of the number of births in this cohort can be found in Fig. The distribution of fertility for this cohort can be ascertained from Fig.

The histogram presented there indicates that numbers of births as a function of the age of the mother increase rapidly from age 14 to 26 years, where they reach a sustained high-level plateau that extends to age 35, declining rapidly over the next 11 years, and tapering off to 0 at age To investigate the association between fertility and longevity, we apply a Cox regression model with number of births as the predictor. The standard deviation SD of the slope for NB is.

According to this model, the relative mortality risk declines by 1. For example, the relative risk declines to. In an additional analysis, we compare a group of women with lower fertility one to seven births with a group with higher fertility eight or more births , dividing the cohort into two approximately equal large groups.

Then the average odds ratio for the probability of dying in a given year within the age range of 50—80 years was found to be 1. Nonparametric estimates of the probability densities of remaining lifetimes after the age of 50 years for the low- and high-fertility groups are provided in Fig. These estimates provide valuable information about the distribution of remaining lifetime or remaining life expectancy.

The shift toward longer remaining lifetimes for the higher-fertility group is quite obvious. These results clearly imply that very high fertility is associated with overall lower late-life mortality. One possible hypothesis to explain this shift toward increased remaining life expectancy for the more fertile group is that extended remaining life expectancy for mothers with many children confers an evolutionary advantage.

Highly fertile women will tend to have small children at age 50, and their increased longevity is likely to improve the chances of survival for their offspring. A consequence of this hypothesis is the prediction that, for women aged 50 years, remaining life expectancy increases specifically with decreasing age of the youngest child. The slope of the predictor log 10 age in the Cox model is. If both log 10 age and number of births are considered as predictors, only log 10 age remains significant, indicating that the effect of increased fertility on reducing postmenopausal mortality is indeed mediated by a late birth of the last child.

A simple linear regression analysis of remaining life span versus log 10 age of the youngest child shows that life span increases by 3.

For example, a mother with a child of 1 year at age 50 will live 2. These analyses point to a protective effect of a late birth for the mother. This protective effect is illustrated in Fig. On the methodological level, it is relevant to note that we restrict our study of remaining lifetime to women who are 50 years old and who are thus past the period of increased mortality that is associated with the reproductive phase.

This restriction is necessary in order to avoid confounding deaths caused by childbearing with postreproductive mortality. Women that live longer have the opportunity to bear more children, and a direct analysis of the association between overall lifetime and number of offspring will lead to a correlation between these quantities that is purely an artifact and results from confounding.

A cost of reproduction is indeed manifesting itself during the time of reproduction, as is clearly evidenced in Fig. In Fig. This sample is much larger than the one considered herein, as it also includes the nulliparous women and in particular women that did not live to age Here, the densities of the distribution of lifetime age at death are shown for three fertility groups of women in the overall sample, irrespective of whether they survived to age 50 or not. The corresponding hazard rate estimates smoothed and transformed mortality rates, also known as trajectories of mortality are displayed in Fig.

It is obvious that there is a large death toll directly associated with childbearing in this historical cohort. Crunch the numbers and you see that when only 25, eggs are left in the ovaries around age 37 , you have about 15 years until you reach menopause , on average. Some will hit menopause earlier, and some will hit it later. Related: What you should know about having a baby at But what about the quality? This is why the chances of having a baby with Down syndrome and other developmental abnormalities increase as you age.

You can think of your egg reserve as a little army. The strongest soldiers are on the front lines. As the years go by, your eggs are ovulated or discarded, and older, lower quality ones remain. Exactly when this happens depends on the number of eggs that you were born with. Remember that discrepancy between 1 or 2 million?

If you were born with a larger number of eggs, you may be among the women who are able to have biological children naturally into their mid- or even late 40s. Related: Having a baby at Are you having trouble getting pregnant?

Many women who consider EFP are motivated by the ticking of their biological clock. Others may be about to start chemotherapy treatments that could affect their fertility.

Considering EFP? Other reproductive technologies, such as in vitro fertilization , are also allowing women in their 40s — and even 50s — to achieve pregnancy. Please note that IVF with your own eggs is unlikely to be a viable option for an infertile woman who is past her early 40s. However, donor eggs from younger women can allow women in their 40s and 50s to conceive.