It's also in the Guardian - seems like a balanced article and interesting contribution to the debate.
Babies who are breastfed cope significantly better with stress in later life than those fed formula from a bottle, according to research published today. Scientists studied a group of 9,000 children to determine if those who were breastfed were more emotionally resilient if their parents divorced or separated.
They found children who had undergone this trauma experienced greater levels of anxiety than those whose parents stayed together. But children who were breastfed were better equipped to deal with the problem than those who were fed by bottle and were "significantly less anxious". Breastfed children were almost twice as likely to be highly anxious if their parents had divorced or separated compared to those who stayed together. But children who had been bottlefed were more than nine times as likely to be highly anxious as those whose parents had stayed married. At a conservative estimate, breastfed children were 10% less stressed if their parents divorced than those who were not breastfed.
The findings, published in the BMJ journal, the Archives of Disease in Childhood, were based on a cohort of children born in 1970. Information was obtained at birth and when they were five and 10, including whether they had been breastfed and if their parents had divorced or separated. Aged 10, their teachers were asked to rate their anxiety. The researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm found the beneficial effect of breastfeeding held true even if the breastfed children had young mothers, came from a lower socioeconomic class, or had mothers with depression - all factors associated with higher levels of anxiety. The impact on stress occurred even if the mothers only breastfed for a few weeks.
Dr Scott Montgomery, the epidemiologist who led the research, said: "These children were still quite young to be exposed to huge levels of stress and, in theory, if they hadn't experienced separation or divorce they would all have similar levels of anxiety - though the breastfed children would have hidden reserves of resilience. [We found] that the non-breastfed children were nine times as likely to be distressed by divorce, while in the breastfed group they were only twice as likely to be distressed."
The Department of Health advises mothers to breastfeed for the first six months of the child's life, but only 22% are still breastfeeding by this point.
NHS guidelines published last week estimate that the number of breastfeeding mothers will increase by 10% by 2012. This should cut rates of respiratory infections and gastroenteritis among babies, while breastfeeding also lowers the risk of food allergies chest infections.
But research published yesterday in the New Scientist suggests that feeding children exclusively on breast milk for nine months or more appeared to increase their risk of developing allergic conditions. The study, by the Helsinki Skin and Allergy Hospital in Finland, found that, at the age of five, 56% of children with a family history of allergies who had been breastfed for at least nine months were showing allergic symptoms, compared to 20% breastfed for two to six months.