The largest randomized study of breastfeeding ever conducted reports that breastfeeding appears to raise children’s IQs and improve their academic performance, a Canadian research team has found.
In an article entitled Breastfeeding and Child Cognitive Development, published in the current issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry, lead investigator Dr. Michael Kramer reported the results from following the same group of 14,000 children for 6.5 years.
‘Our study provides the strongest evidence to date that prolonged and exclusive breastfeeding makes kids smarter,’ said Kramer, a professor of pediatrics, epidemiology and biostatistics with Montreal-based McGill University faculty of medicine.
Kramer and his colleagues evaluated the children in 31 Belarusian hospitals and clinics.
Half the mothers were exposed to an intervention that encouraged prolonged and exclusive breastfeeding. The remaining half continued their usual maternity hospital and outpatient pediatric care and follow up.
This allowed the researchers to measure the effect of breastfeeding on the children’s cognitive development without the results being biased by differences in factors such as the mother’s intelligence or her way of interacting with her baby.
The children’s cognitive ability was assessed by IQ tests administered by the children’s pediatricians and by their teachers’ ratings of their academic performance in reading, writing, mathematics and other subjects.
Both sets of measures were significantly higher in the group randomized to the breastfeeding promotion intervention.
‘The effect of breastfeeding on brain development and intelligence has long been a popular and hotly debated topic,’ said Kramer.
‘While most studies have been based on association, however, we can now make a causal inference between breastfeeding and intelligence – because of the randomized design of our study.’
Source: Archives of General Psychiatry
Click here for article: Women's Health Matters
No comments:
Post a Comment