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| Breastfed Babies Have Higher IQs |
85 Views |
| posted on Wednesday, May 07, 2008 |
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BREASTFED BABIES HAVE HIGHER IQS, NEW CANADIAN STUDY REPORTS
Research focused on 14,000 children in Belarus
By Sby haron Kirkey
The Ottawa Citizen
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Original Link
In the largest study of its kind, Canadian researchers following nearly 14,000 Belarusian children are reporting that those who were exclusively breastfed longer score higher on IQ tests and in academic performance in reading and writing.
This is not the first study linking breastfeeding to an IQ advantage, but many observers haven't been so convinced. That's because it has been impossible in the past to separate out how much of the difference was attributable to breastfeeding and how much to differences in the mothers and the way they interact with their babies.
The Montreal team believes its study, the largest randomized trial ever conducted in the area of human lactation, offers the strongest evidence yet that it's cause-and-effect -- in other words, "that prolonged and exclusive breastfeeding makes kids smarter," lead investigator Dr. Michael Kramer says.
"We still don't know if it's something in the milk, a hormone or protein or something that's not in formula or cow's milk," says Dr. Kramer, a professor of pediatrics and epidemiology and biostatistics at McGill University.
"Or whether it's just the physical contact between mother and baby, or the kind of exchanges that occur, emotional or verbal even, during the act of breastfeeding that don't occur in formula feeding" that might lead to permanent changes affecting brain development, he says. "I'd like to hope that it's something in the physical contact rather than in something that the formula manufacturers can manage to put in a bottle, but there's no evidence for that."
Despite the findings, Dr. Kramer says, "there are lots of ways you can improve your child's health and intellectual development. I wouldn't bet a lot of money that breastfeeding was more important than reading and playing with your kid."
Psychologist Alan Leschied says the differences in IQ scores were meaningful, but not large, and a standard IQ score "is a pretty solitary thing."
"It doesn't accurately predict things like academic achievement, not necessarily. It doesn't predict vocational success. So you don't want to overstate what IQ scores actually mean," says Mr. Leschied, psychologist and professor in the faculty of education at the University of Western Ontario in London.
The study appears in the most recent issue of Archives of General Psychiatry.
Until now, human lactation studies have been hampered because researchers can't randomly assign women to breastfeeding versus formula feeding. "It's not ethical or feasible to say, you breastfeed and you don't," Dr. Kramer says.
So he 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 other half had the usual maternity and pediatric care.
"The former Soviet Union, when it broke up in the early '90s, resembled the maternity hospital practices in the U.S. and Canada 20 or 30 years earlier," Dr. Kramer says.
A total of 7,108 babies and mothers who visited facilities promoting breastfeeding and 6,781 infants and mothers who visited the "control" hospitals were followed up between 2002 and 2005. Both groups of women were similar in age, socioeconomic status, education, number of other children at home, whether they smoked during pregnancy, birthweight and other factors.
Mothers in the experimental group were seven times more likely than the control group to be exclusively breastfeeding (no foods or liquids other than breast milk) at three months of age (43 per cent versus six per cent). However, it was low in both groups at six months (eight per cent versus 0.6 per cent).
At age 61/2, the children in the breastfeeding intervention group scored an average of 7.5 points higher on tests measuring verbal IQ, 2.9 points higher on tests measuring non-verbal intelligence and 5.9 points higher on tests measuring overall intelligence. Their teachers also rated them higher in reading and writing.
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