Lots of talk about the biological clock swirls around numbers: You’re born with all the eggs you’ll ever have, and each year you lose another chunk, the decline ramping up precipitously as you reach and surpass the fateful age of 35. But the truth is, the reproductive potential of your ovaries isn’t just a numbers game. The quality of your eggs, or whether they have a normal genetic makeup and optimal capacity to support the development of an embryo, plays a key role in determining if you ultimately get pregnant and have a healthy baby. It’s only natural to wonder, then, how you might improve your egg quality for better odds.
Off the bat, you should know that a great deal of egg quality, much like quantity, is a function of age. As we grow older, “not only do we lose eggs, but the eggs we retain get more and more DNA mutations, which can lead to an egg with the wrong number of chromosomes,” Anate Brauer, MD, a board-certified reproductive endocrinologist at RMA of New York, tells SELF. “That egg either won’t fertilize, will fertilize and then not implant, or will fertilize, implant, and ultimately lead to miscarriage.” Genetic abnormalities, health conditions like endometriosis and polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), and medical treatments like chemotherapy and radiation can also mess with DNA, compounding the age-related quality dropoff. And certain lifestyle factors that put the body in a stressful state can potentially have a similar impact, Dr. Brauer says (more on this to come).
DNA normalcy aside, other facets of an egg—like its shape and the function of its cellular structures—can also influence its potential to get fertilized and continually divide and grow into a healthy pregnancy, Brooke Rossi, MD, a board-certified reproductive endocrinologist at Ohio Reproductive Medicine, tells SELF. The workings of an egg’s mitochondria, or energy-producing powerhouses, is especially key, as an egg requires a ton of fuel to turn into an embryo and ultimately develop into a human being. Factors like age, health, and yes, lifestyle can also futz with mitochondrial form and function, shifting your egg quality (for better or worse).
To what extent you can really modify any of these aspects of egg quality with lifestyle behaviors, however, is still scientifically fuzzy. There’s also no test for egg quality—blood tests for anti-müllerian hormone (AMH) and follicle stimulating hormone (FSH) only give you a picture of your egg quantity, so “we don’t know if there’s a quality issue unless we pull the eggs out and look at them under a microscope, as with in-vitro fertilization (IVF),” Dr. Rossi says. But given the relevance of egg quality for a thriving pregnancy, it’s worth considering behaviors with some research-backed potential to improve it—if only because this might be the one aspect of your fertility you can control, she notes. Read on to learn what the research says can (and can’t) affect egg quality, and what you might do about it.
What are the lifestyle factors that could make a difference in your egg quality?
Behaviors that could potentially harm egg quality
As mentioned, doing certain not-so-supportive activities could hurt your eggs largely by causing what’s known as oxidative stress in your body, which occurs when cell-damaging molecules called free radicals outnumber the helpful antioxidants that neutralize them. In particular, smoking, vaping, drinking alcohol, skipping sleep, using recreational drugs (like marijuana), and downing a ton of sugar may all contribute to an excess of those free-wheeling free radicals and impair your body’s ability to defend against them. Over time, that can damage your cells, including your eggs, potentially impacting their DNA or the functioning of their mitochondria. And as noted, both changes can make it tougher to get pregnant or carry a healthy baby to term.