www.baltimoresun.com/health/sns-rt-us-breast-feeding-20131225,0,5236029.story
baltimoresun.com
Longer breastfeeding tied to better development
Shereen Jegtvig
Reuters
11:02 AM EST, December 25, 2013
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Children who were breastfed for more than six months scored the highest on cognitive, language and motor development tests as toddlers, in a new study from Greece.
Earlier research tied breastfeeding to better thinking and memory skills. But how it's related to language skills and movement and coordination had been less clear.
The new study doesn't prove breastfeeding is responsible for better development, but it shows a strong association, researchers said.
Most evidence "pretty clearly shows there are significant medical benefits of breast-feeding," Dr. Dimitri Christakis told Reuters Health in an email.
Christakis is a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington and director of the Center for Child Health, Behavior and Development at Seattle Children's Research Institute. He was not involved in the new study.
"I think that the evidence is now of sufficient quality that we can close the book on these benefits and focus instead on how do we succeed in promoting breast-feeding because all of the studies, including this one, that have looked at it have found a linear relationship, which is to say that the benefits accrue with each additional month that a child is breastfed," he said.
For their report, Dr. Leda Chatzi from the University of Crete and her colleagues used data from a long-term study of 540 mothers and their kids.
When the babies were nine months old, the researchers asked mothers when they started breastfeeding and how long they breastfed. They updated the information when the children were 18 months old.
Psychologists also tested children's cognitive abilities, language skills and motor development at 18 months.
About 89 percent of the babies were ever breastfed. Of those, 13 percent were breastfed for less than one month, 52 percent for between one and six months and 35 percent for longer than six months.
Children who were breastfed for any amount of time scored higher on the cognitive, receptive communication and fine motor portions of the test than children who weren't breastfed.
Scores on the cognitive, receptive and expressive communication and fine motor sections were highest among children who were breastfed for more than six months, the researchers reported in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
For instance, on cognitive assessments with a normal score of 100, toddlers who were never breastfed scored about a 97, on average. Kids who were breastfed for more than six months scored a 104.
Chatzi and her colleagues expected to see more breastfeeding than they did.
"We were surprised by the fact that breastfeeding levels in Greece remain low, even though there is an ongoing effort by the Greek State to promote breastfeeding practices," Chatzi told Reuters Health in an email.
Christakis pointed out that in the United States, about 60 to 80 percent of women start breastfeeding their babies, but by four months less than 30 percent are still breastfeeding.
The World Health Organization recommends exclusive breastfeeding - without any formula or solid food - until a baby is six months old, followed by breastfeeding with the addition of appropriate foods through age two.
"One of the reasons we see such a big drop off in the United States and elsewhere around four months is because women return to work," Christakis said.
"The real challenge we have is with sustaining breast-feeding," he said. "I believe very strongly that we need a public health approach to doing so because these are public health issues - improving child cognition and improving in this case as they showed a child's physical development, benefits society as a whole and society has to support women achieving that goal."
"We need to have baby-friendly work places that help women continue to either breast-feed or pump when they return to work," Christakis said.
"There's that African proverb, ‘it takes a village to raise a child,'" he said. "It takes a village to breast-feed a child as well, and all sectors have to contribute."
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/JPdFqm Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, online December 13, 2013
Copyright © 2013, Reuters
Professional breastfeeding education and support. Breastfeeding, childbirth and baby care issues.
Showing posts with label extended breastfeeding. Show all posts
Showing posts with label extended breastfeeding. Show all posts
Thursday, December 26, 2013
Saturday, December 21, 2013
Lactation Consultants help new Moms
Lactation Consultants Increase Breast-feeding
Megan Brooks
December 20, 2013
Comment
Editors' Recommendations
Primary Care Protocol May Increase Exclusive Breast-feeding
Hospital Accreditation Doesn't Ensure Breastfeeding
Topic Alert
Personal Alert
Receive an email from Medscape whenever new articles on this topic are available.
Personal Alert Add Pregnancy to My Topic Alert
Drug & Reference Information
Counseling the Breastfeeding Mother
Human Milk and Lactation
Breast Embryology
Pre- and postnatal visits with a certified lactation consultant (LC) coupled with electronic reminders for healthcare providers to discuss breast-feeding at prenatal visits may boost breast-feeding duration and intensity, new research shows.
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends exclusive breast-feeding for the first 6 months after birth, followed by continued breast-feeding for 1 year or more as other foods are introduced. Yet less than 75% of infants in the United States are breast-fed at all, and fewer than half are still being breast-fed at 6 months, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Under the Affordable Care Act, private insurers must cover professional breast-feeding support without cost-sharing.
In 2 separate clinical trials, Karen Bonuck, PhD, from the Department of Family and Social Medicine, Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University in New York City, and colleagues found that integrating professional LCs into routine care alone or combined with electronic prompted guidance (EP) from prenatal care providers increased breast-feeding at 3 months postpartum.
The studies were published online December 19 in the American Journal of Public Health.
In the Best Infant Nutrition for Good Outcomes (BINGO) trial, 666 primarily low-income women were randomly allocated to 1 of 4 groups: LC alone, LC+EP, EP alone, and usual care (the control group). The LC protocol included 2 prenatal sessions, a hospital visit, and regular telephone calls postpartum though age 3 months or until breast-feeding ceased.
The study team followed-up with the women periodically to assess breast-feeding "intensity," defined as the percentage of all feedings during the last 7 days that were breast milk. They defined high intensity as 80% or more of feedings involving breast milk, medium intensity as 20% to 79%, and low intensity as 19% or less.
At 3 months, high-intensity breast-feeding was greater in the LC+EP group (17.3%; odds ratio [OR], 2.72; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.08 - 6.84) and the LC-only group (20.5%; OR, 3.22; 95% CI, 1.14 - 9.09) compared with usual care (8.1%).
In addition, women in the LC+EP group were more likely to initiate breast-feeding, do "any" breast-feeding (vs none) at 1 month, and breast-feed exclusively at 3 months postpartum compared with the control group. The EP group did not differ from the control group on any outcome.
The Provider Approaches to Improved Rates of Infant Nutrition & Growth Study (PAIRINGS) study included 275 women from more economically diverse backgrounds (compared with BINGO participants), many more of whom planned to breast-feed exclusively (62% vs 37% in BINGO).
They were randomly allocated to a usual care control group and a group receiving both the LC+EP interventions. For the PAIRINGS primary outcome of exclusive breast-feeding at 3 months, rates were significantly higher with LC+EP than usual care (16.0% vs 6.2%; OR, 2.86; 95% CI, 1.21 - 6.76).
As in BINGO, any breast-feeding and both high- and medium-intensity breast-feeding were more likely with LC+EP than usual care.
Finding Was Robust in Tough Groups
The researchers point out that black/non-Hispanic, younger, overweight and less-educated women are known to have some of the lowest rates of breast-feeding, and together, these women made up a large majority of those enrolled in the BINGO and PAIRINGS trials.
The findings were "robust in what is traditionally thought of as a difficult-to-support breast-feeding population," Dr. Bonuck noted in an interview with Medscape Medical News.
Although neither trial came close to attaining exclusive breast-feeding for 6 months, as advocated by the American Academy of Pediatrics, about 95% of women in the 2 trials at least started breast-feeding, which exceeds the goal of 82% that the CDC has proposed in its Healthy People 2020 report, Dr. Bonuck points out.
"This study is significant because it shows that integrating lactation consultants into prenatal care increases breastfeeding rates among low income racial/ethnic minority women," Tonse N.K. Raju, MD, chief of the National Institutes of Health's Pregnancy and Perinatology Branch of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, said in news release.
"We need additional studies to see if this and other interventions can enhance breastfeeding by these women beyond a few months," Dr. Raju added.
This research was supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities. The authors have disclosed no relevant financial relationships.
Am J Public Health. Published online December 20, 2013. Abstract
Comment
Monday, October 28, 2013
Friday, August 30, 2013
Friday, May 11, 2012
Time magazine's breastfeeding cover
I am a Lactation Consultant and breastfeeding advocate; so I am supportive of almost anything that promotes breastfeeding. The TIME magazine cover was the brainchild of their advertising dept., meant soley to increase their mag...azine's sales...at any cost. The breastfeeding mother should be supported by her family, friends and our society. TIME magazine has exploited this issue, and caused more harm by polarizing people on the issue of breastfeeding. The US's breastfeeding rates are lower than most other countries. Breastfeeding is recommended by the AAP, CDC, and WHO. Breastfeeding is not just a lifestyle choice, but because of the short and long term health benefits to both mother and child; it becomes a national health issue. www.babyfirstlactation.comSee More
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)