New research - "long term exclusive BF boosts IQ".

[sallyforth]

This is an interventional study where hospitals in Belarus were randomised to a breastfeeding promotion programme or not. There was a moderate effect of this programme on bf vs ff rates (especially at 1 year) and a very striking difference in ebf vs mix feeding rates.

The children in the intervention group had higher IQs at 6.5years of follow up.

news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080505/hl_nm/breastfeeding_dc_4 www.eurekalert.org/pub_r eleases/2008-05/jaaj-bmi050108.php

Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2008;65(5):578-584.

No research study is perfect, and you can't say just from this that "long term exclusive BF boosts IQ", nevertheless the evidence for a real effect is fairly good.

And my personal take on it is that I'd be wanting it not to show an effect since I am mix feeding... meh.

Excellent, yet more ammo for those who want to make those unable to BF feel like lepers. Sorry, having a bad morning!

BB I'm sure that wasn't the intention!

Seriously though, that is great news. Maybe that will stop people from glaring at me as I BF my toddler in public (then again, maybe not!)

No Bella, but it might help your toddler come back with a witty retort.

Thats intersting. I havent managed to read the paper yet, but because it was an intervention study rather than an observational one hopefully this paper may clear up some of the question about how much of the IQ difference in breast fed babies is to do with the mum rather than the milk.

Yeah I know... but
(1) if you can't ebf (and I can't), I might as well not worry about what I can't do anything about
(2) bf vs ff is anyway just one of the things that affect childhood iq, and a very minor factor at that... far greater, I'd think, would be the parents' own attitudes to books and learning. And after the 6.5 year study period, ie past the first few years of school, it probably makes much more of a difference whether the kids are lazy ASBO little b*ggers or confident and happy kids who want the teacher to like them!

... off to get 3mo ds his library card ;) ...

IMO the diff in IQ is quite likely to be something to do with the way mum and baby interact while feeding, rather than any particular constituent of breast milk. They reference a really interesting body of work on rats which suggests that close physical contact between mum and baby in the early days causes long term changes in brain chemistry making the pups more resilient to stress when they grow up.

I do howver retain a nagging doubt about the cluster randomisation method - kids who were born at different hospitals also probably went to different schools. And they failed to show any effect on asthma/allergies etc. which might be less strongly affected by postcode itself.

It is always going to be hard to separate out the effects of the interaction of breastfeeding from the effects of breastmilk's ingredients - it wouldn't be at all surprising if both these sets of effects were important, and we could easily hypothesis this: we know the constituents of breastmilk support neurological development and we know that close physical and tactile contact supports it too.

We may get to a point where ff mothers are strongly encouraged not to share the feeding with other people (or not very much) and to feed skin to skin, to enable similar effects to happen. A lot of mothers do this, anyway, but I haven't seen much formal advice on these lines.

BritishBeef - who wants to make you feel like a 'leper', ffs?

Yes, I suppose what I really meant was that hopefully this study will help separate out how much of the difference is about being breastfed, and how much is due to the mums educational and socioeconomic status.

BritishBeef - I get very passionate about breastfeeding and quite angry about formula, but it's not about the mother. In most cases the mothers who "couldn't" are the ones who didn't have the right support. I've even heard women say "I had lots of support" but if in the end it wasn't working then the supporter couldn't have been that good. What makes me angry is that so many women are being let down by the system. They're told they should breastfeed but not helped to do it.

Yes, breastfeeding is normal and natural but in cultures where it is the norm everyone does it and everyone is exposed to it. In our culture it's not the norm, we're not generally exposed to it on a daily basis so we often need to be shown how to do it. Doctors, midwives and health visitors often don't have the time to sit with mothers and make sure she is feeding, she could need someone to sit with her for a few hours but their workload is too high for that and it becomes too easy to say to a new mum "try a bottle" (Casualty style )

Please don't feel a leper or let anyone make you feel like it. You gave your best but if you didn't have the help you didn't have control over the situation, it's not your fault.