What is the relationship between eggs and oxidative stress, and can egg number and egg aging be prevented by reducing oxidative stress?
As women age, their ability to conceive declines. This is because eggs are ovulated every month, and as the body ages, so do the eggs. In this article, I explain the relationship between oxidative stress and egg aging.
What is egg aging?
When a woman is about 20 years old, she is in a very fertile state. However, after the age of 36, and especially after the age of 40, the chances of getting pregnant decrease rapidly.
One of the reasons for this is the aging of the eggs.
One egg is normally ovulated each month. Ovulation is the process of breaking the follicle that has grown in the ovary and allowing the egg to leave. The egg that leaves the ovary during ovulation passes through the fallopian tube and meets a sperm. The sperm then enters the egg and fertilizes it, resulting in a fertilized egg. The fertilized egg then undergoes cell division and passes through the fallopian tubes to implant in the lining of the uterus, resulting in a pregnancy.
In order for a pregnancy to take place, it is very important that the ovulated egg is fertilized and becomes a fertilized egg.
The aging of the egg means that the quality of the egg produced inside the woman's body deteriorates due to oxidative stress, which damages the genes inside the egg.
Inside the egg is a nucleus, which contains a lot of genetic information. When oxidative stress is high, this genetic information is more susceptible to damage.
Hardening of the egg's membrane?
And there is something even more revealing.
As eggs age due to oxidative stress, their membranes harden.
When an egg is ovulated, it encounters hundreds of millions of sperm that arrive at the entrance of the fallopian tube. From there, one of the hundreds of millions of sperm can enter the egg. If the egg's membrane becomes hardened due to oxidative stress, it becomes difficult for the sperm to enter the egg. In other words, it becomes difficult to fertilize the egg.
Therefore, there is data to suggest that lowering oxidative stress can increase the chances of conception.
For example, data from a survey of several thousand people in Australia showed that both men and women who took antioxidant supplements doubled their chances of becoming pregnant and having children.
Is the number of eggs determined at birth?
It is said that the number of eggs is determined at birth.
When a baby girl is born, her ovaries have already been formed.
There are two ovaries, and in each ovary there is a primordial follicle, the cell from which the egg is derived.
These "primordial follicles" decrease in number as a woman is born and grows. Therefore, immediately after birth, a woman has the largest number of primordial follicles. It is not possible to increase the number of primordial follicles. The fact that you cannot increase the number of primordial follicles means that the number of eggs a woman can produce in her body is limited.
However, even if it is not possible to increase the number of eggs, it is still possible to maintain the quality of the eggs you have, and to prevent the eggs from aging, thereby keeping the quality of the eggs.
When oxidative stress is high, the genetic information in the egg can be damaged, so basically, not increasing oxidative stress is the best way to keep more eggs of good quality.