 |
| Xena (Lucy Lawless) seen here breastfeeding her baby gal for the campaign. |
"Suckling at the breast results in changes in the mother's brain—increased blood flow and oxytocin release [a hormone promoting bonding between mother and infant], and probably in the baby's brain."
Children breast-fed longer than six months scored a 3.8-point IQ margin over those who were bottle-fed, according to a seven-year study by researchers at Jagiellonian University Medical College in Poland.
Medical epidemiologist Wieslaw Jedrychowski and colleagues followed 468 babies born to nonsmoking mothers. The children were tested five times at regular intervals from infancy through preschool age. The data showed that cognitive abilities of preschoolers who were breast-fed scored significantly higher than bottle-fed infants, and IQ score was directly proportional to how long the infants had been breast-fed: IQs were 2.1 points higher in children who were breast-fed for three months; 2.6 points higher when babies were breast-fed for four to six months; 3.8 points higher in children breast-fed longer than six months. The results were published in the May 2011 issue of the European Journal of Pediatrics.
This research confirms observations reported 70 years ago by Carolyn Hoefer and Mattie Hardy in JAMA The Journal of the American Medical Association, as well as many subsequent studies. This body of research provides the scientific basis for the World Health Organization's recommendation that all infants should be exclusively breast-fed for the first six months of life. But what is the missing ingredient that undermines the cognitive development of bottle-fed babies?
Chemists searching for a specific compound in mother's milk have been overlooking the obvious difference between breast-feeding and bottle-feeding—something that could easily account for the difference in cognitive development, wrote Tonse Raju, a pediatrician and neonatalogist at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in the current issue of Breastfeeding Medicine, October 2011. (Raju was not involved in the Jedrychowski study.)
"Sometimes even the most obvious facts need to be reiterated," he wrote. "An infant suckling at his or her mother's breast is not simply receiving a meal, but is intensely engaged in a dynamic, bidirectional, biological dialogue." It is the physical and psychological bonding and interaction between infant and mother during breast-feeding that nurtures development of an infant's cognitive abilities.
Jedrychowski strongly agrees with Raju's statement, and adds: "I believe the IQ effect may in part be explained by this dynamic interaction between mother and child in the breast-feeding process."
Brain bulk and white matter in early life (Continue next page)
