Please somebody tell me about the research that shows that weaning before 6 months "may damage your baby".

[SenoraPostrophe]

....only all I can find is the Gill Rapely research, which, as far as I can tell, was based on a small study, centered on chewing not digestion and wasn't longitudinal. I could be wrong as the paper itself isn't online. I did find lots of summaries of it and lots of talk about stone age mothers not having blenders (well no, but they did have teeth).

Is there more to it than this? and if not, why is everybody being quite so aggressive about it?

No, it turns out they are not separate issues. Gill Rapley is the Deputy Programme Director of Unicef Baby Friendly Initiative apparently. and her research is the ONLY research I can find cited in relation to the advice to wean at 6 months rather than 4. But I presume there's some offline or hard to find stuff that I don't know about which is why I'm asking.

well, that suggests there is some evidence, but I want to know what that "current evidence" is.

ooo, google scholar. I didn't know that existed. sounds good.

...lol.

The first one that has anything to do with breastfeeding I found concludes this: "This study confirms that every mother-infant pair needs to be understood as a unique dyad throughout lactation"

...ain't that the truth.

didn't Gill's small piece of research actually start weaning at 4 months but because it was self-feeding most of the babies started getting going at 6 months? i think that all Gill's done is comment on the coincidence between that finding and the WHO guideline in an iwantmymum webchat, somethign along the lines of 'babies being rather clever' if they're left to their own devices.

if you're looking for research proving harm i think Gill's paper or an abstract thereof is not the place to start. as i understand it the thinkig is that if the baby can pick it up and eat it, then it shoudl follow that the baby is okay to pick it up and eat it. so it's an argument for early self-feeding if that's the way the child seems to be going, in actual fact.

i've never seen mention of research that proves harm at 4-6 months. but the virgin gut theory seems to indicate that the gut closes at some time around 4-6 months so a child may be absolutely fine but it may not. i imagine there are a zillion hereditary and environmental factors that come into play there. so given that a child survives rather nicely on BM alone (or even formula, although i think that is probably more open to debate) until 6 months then why take a risk?

in essence it's more the 'no harm' until 6 months that's been proven than the 'harm' at 4 months, as i understand it. but as a BLWer it so happens that i think if my sitting-up 5-month-old child swiped a bit of carrot and was able to eat it and produce it in their nappy the following day i'd let them eat.

did you ahve a look at the weaning research thread? lots of reading there...

SP- I looked on google scholar last week and the only recent stuff I could find said that the benefits in non-devloping countries were not clear. On that hideous thread I posted a few links- and a brief (civilised) discussion about them followed.

Problem with advice for populations (I believe) is each child is going to be different. As I said on that previous thread I don't believe that weaning ds3 at 5 months was daft, I think giving him gluten now (aged 2) would be stupid given our particular family history.

Okay, but on that other very emotive thread, there was mention of babies developing a stoma (I don't know what it is, but it sounds scary) by 12 months as a result of early weaning.

Where did that come from?

ok for anyone interested, this is the most cited study - a literature review. the other studies I found are the ones mentioned below.

"Twenty independent studies meeting the selection criteria were identified by the literature search: nine from developing countries (two of which were controlled trials in Honduras) and 11 from developed countries (all observational studies). The two trials did not receive high methodologic quality ratings but were nonetheless superior to any of the observational studies included in this review. The observational studies were of variable quality; in addition, their nonexperimental designs were not able to exclude potential sources of confounding and selection bias. Definitions of exclusive breastfeeding varied considerably across studies. Neither the trials nor the observational studies suggest that infants who continue to be exclusively breastfed for six months show deficits in weight or length gain, although larger sample sizes would be required to rule out modest differences in risk of undernutrition. The data are conflicting with respect to iron status, but at least in developing country settings where newborn iron stores may be suboptimal, suggest that exclusive breastfeeding without iron supplementation through six months may compromise hematologic status. Based primarily on an observational analysis of a large randomized trial in Belarus, infants who continue exclusive breastfeeding for six months or more appear to have a significantly reduced risk of one or more episodes of gastrointestinal infection. No significant reduction in risk of atopic eczema, asthma, or other atopic outcomes has been demonstrated in studies from Finland, Australia, and Belarus. Data from the two Honduran trials suggest that exclusive breastfeeding through six months is associated with delayed resumption of menses and more rapid postpartum weight loss in the mother."

in conclusion, there isn't really any evidence to suggest that everyone should breastfeed for 6 months in developed countries, although babies weaned before 6 months might be more likely to get a gastrointestinal infection, although presumably babies with big brothers who keep kissing them are just as likley to get infections as babies who are weaned at 4 months. well, bugger me.

I wish I'd weaned at 4 months. might not have all these sleep shenanigans.

Really? That's it?

Gosh. What a lot of heat all this generates, with so little light!

Thanks for posting that, SP.

ok, it took me a while to post that. gess - i didn't see your links (skim read a bit I must say). looks like you had similar results to me.

Interesting SP - let us know if you find anything else...

HunkerMunker just posted this on another thread. Not read it in depth as I am passed the weaning stage but it looks as though there is some evidence based 'resaons' within

i think so, dinosaur.

If there are other studies they're either very new or badly cited.

Dinosaur - I think a stoma is where the bowel is passed thru an opening in the skin as a result of surgey, so that the stools are collected in a bag. As in colostomy and ileostomy.

Not plesant if early weaning is damaging the intestines so much that they have to be rested by such a dramastic surgical procedure.

no no dino, that was purely anecdotal, from me as it happens. i didn't claim, ever, that it was from research.

my friend, a remarkable woman, has crohn's. she was told twenty years ago that seh'd be dead within the week, that sort of thing. she's amazing, the longest-living person in the world with her type of feed tube etcetcetc.

we were talking about risk management on that thread, which is principally the reason i'd wait the 6 months, and i was saying that my friend had told me she'd throttle me if i weaned before 6 months as back in the 80s her docs were talking about weaning (also mmr and other things like cereal crop sizes, a more chemical environment etc etc) as possibly being implicated in the rise of crohns.

since then, she was saying, she's seen a huge rise in crohn's and because she's too poorly to work she volunteers at hospitals and goes to speak to people about living with crohns etc. patients and medical types.

so she was saying that she is seeing a rise in the number of children with stomas (those bags that you wear to poo into) and had seen children as young as 18 months. in the absence of a real medical understanding for why this upsurge has taken place and given that the 6months guideline isn't hard to do, she said she'd kill me if i didn't abide by it. hence i think that abiding by the 6 months is risk management.

that's all. it was never represented as anything other than that, tbh.

slug: the main study quoted in that article defines "early weaning" as weaning before 15 weeks!

This is interesting, I am debating what to do with DS who has just hit 5 months. He has started waking in the night after having been a dream baby! He is a big boy, he weighs 8'5 kilos and is 63 cms long. The Spanish doctors are recommending that I start to feed him.

I weaned dd at about 18 weeks, the recommendation was 16 weeks then and looking back on it I don't think she really needed it. But El Gordo definitely does.

Thanks Aitch.

As I said, I was trying to define 'stoma'...please don't beat me up....I am an angry slug tonight you know

Are you the same poster who just used to post as Slug? Or have you stolen her identity ?

yes it's a feckin sleep thing.

dd was weaned at 4 months. slept like an angel.

we won't talk about ds1 (weaned at 5 months)

ds2 did sleep like an angel until about 4 months and hasn't slept since. he was weaned at 6 months.

I know this is anecdotal, but it is a theme that I have noticed among the offsrping of just about all my friends. and sleep is one ofd my favourite conversation topics.

dd had some great motherin due to having slept well. ds2 lacks that at times. now I find out it's all based on conjecture. Actually i expect better from the who.