Benefits of Breastfeeding |
Six months gives your baby a higher IQ and more coordination
Background:
There is little doubt that "breast is best" for babies. But how much better breast milk is for babies is open to question. Breast-feeding has been linked to fewer allergies and respiratory conditions such as asthma, protection from gastrointestinal infections, less obesity and even brighter babies with better development. Quite a few studies have already shown that breast fed babies have higher mental (cognitive) development than bottle-fed babies. But there have been problems with these studies ^ the most important being that because mothers who breast-feed tend to be better educated and richer. These factors themselves are linked to higher cognitive development. Therefore a finding that breast-feeding improves cognitive development may just reflect the fact that better educated mothers (who incidentally happen to breast-feed) have babies with better development. Allowing for these "confounding" factors is important, and a recent review of all the evidence did just that, and still concluded that breast-feeding gives babies higher cognitive development scores even when taking wealth and maternal education into account. One other trouble with many of the studies is that they compare exclusively breast-fed babies with exclusively bottle-fed babies. Now in the real world, many babies are started on the breast but change to the bottle after a variable number of months, and many others are mostly breast-fed but take some bottle. Given all these problems, it is extremely difficult to prove whether breast-feeding affects cognitive development. The authors of this study suggest an alternative way of looking at the problem. They suggest that looking at the question in Scandinavian mothers and babies might be useful, given that in Scandinavian countries, all mothers start breastfeeding for at least a few weeks, and that Scandinavian mothers are generally highly educated and there is little poverty. All this similarity tends to remove wealth and maternal education as factors that could "confound" links between breast-feeding and cognitive development.
Findings:
The authors enrolled 345 mothers and babies from Norway and Sweden before the child,s birth to study this question. During the first year of life, they recorded how long children breast-fed for, and did tests of cognitive(intelligence) and motor (movement) development at one year and five years of age. They compared the results depending on how many months the children had been breastfed for. They found that children breast-fed for only three months or less had 1.5-3 times the chance of having lower than normal IQ or development scores at one year of age and again at five years. This means that breastfeeding for six months or longer halved your chance of having low scores! The usual links between mothers, education/ IQ and children,s scores were found. But when the data was reanalysed to take account of this, the link between breast-feeding and better scores was still strong. This is good, clear evidence that the links between breast-feeding and better child development are real if you breastfeed for at least six months. We must continue to promote breastfeeding strongly, and emphasise that breast-feeding should continue for six months if the baby is to get its full benefit.
Action Points:
- Breastfeeding your baby gives it the strongest chance of being generally healthy and developing well in both IQ and motor skills.
- Breastfeeding should continue for six months to maximise the benefit of breastfeeding on the infant brain.
