ArticleAmerican journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council
Is there a trade-off between fertility and longevity? A comparative study of women from three large historical databases accounting for mortality selection.
Article in American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 49 papers.
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Who cites it
49 citing papers in PubMed.
- Genetic trade-offs in fertility and longevity explain the maintenance of disease-associated alleles in humans.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Article
- In Utero Selection Echoes Across a Lifetime: Evidence From Historical Utah Populations.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2026Article
- Birthplace, perinatal loss, and the parity-post-reproductive mortality relationship: Evidence from the Jim Crow-era American South.Social science & medicine (1982) · 2026Article
- Mothers facing greater environmental adversity experience increased costs of reproduction.Science advances · 2025Article
- Jujubae Fructus extract prolongs lifespan and improves stress tolerance in Caenorhabditis elegans dependent on DAF-16/SOD-3.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Pregnancy is linked to faster epigenetic aging in young women.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Changes in age at last birth and its determinants in India.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Impact of fertility on the longevity of older rural Chinese women: an analysis of a longitudinal survey.BMC public health · 2022Article
- Article
- Sex ratios and union formation in the historical population of the St. Lawrence Valley.PloS one · 2022Article
- Immune cell type and DNA methylation vary with reproductive status in women: possible pathways for costs of reproduction.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2022Article
- Predation has small, short-term, and in certain conditions random effects on the evolution of aging.BMC ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- Examining the trade-offs between human fertility and longevity over three centuries using crowdsourced genealogy data.PloS one · 2021Article
- Human uniqueness? Life history diversity among small-scale societies and chimpanzees.PloS one · 2021Article
- Parity predicts biological age acceleration in post-menopausal, but not pre-menopausal, women.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- On the Incongruence between Psychometric and Psychosocial-Biodemographic Measures of Life History.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2020Article
- Overbite depth indicator and anteroposterior dysplasia indicator cephalometric norms for African Americans.The Angle orthodontist · 2019Article
- Life History in a Postconflict Society : Violent Intergroup Conflict Facilitates Fast Life-History Strategy.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2019Article
- Reproduction predicts shorter telomeres and epigenetic age acceleration among young adult women.Scientific reports · 2018Article
- Opportunities for life course research through the integration of data across Clinical and Translational Research Institutes.Journal of clinical and translational science · 2018Article
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6 authors.
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Abstract
Frontier populations provide exceptional opportunities to test the hypothesis of a trade-off between fertility and longevity. In such populations, mechanisms favoring reproduction usually find fertile ground, and if these mechanisms reduce longevity, demographers should observe higher postreproductive mortality among highly fertile women. We test this hypothesis using complete female reproductive histories from three large demographic databases: the Registre de la population du Québec ancien (Université de Montréal), which covers the first centuries of settlement in Quebec; the BALSAC database (Université du Québec à Chicoutimi), including comprehensive records for the Saguenay-Lac-St-Jean (SLSJ) in Quebec in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and the Utah Population Database (University of Utah), including all individuals who experienced a vital event on the Mormon Trail and their descendants. Together, the three samples allow for comparisons over time and space, and represent one of the largest set of natural fertility cohorts used to simultaneously assess reproduction and longevity. Using survival analyses, we found a negative influence of parity and a positive influence of age at last child on postreproductive survival in the three populations, as well as a significant interaction between these two variables. The effect sizes of all these parameters were remarkably similar in the three samples. However, we found little evidence that early fertility affects postreproductive survival. The use of Heckman's procedure assessing the impact of mortality selection during reproductive ages did not appreciably alter these results. We conclude our empirical investigation by discussing the advantages of comparative approaches.
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