Dear All:

Usually I am pretty good at reading studies, but I have to say that the Burdette study in the AJCN 
was the most irritating study I have ever attempted to read.  I spent $20 just to get access to the 
AJCN to read the study and then each section that describes the categories they chose says 
something different. 

In the methods, they talked about asking the mother about breastfeeding before 1 month, 1-3 
months, 4-6 months, etc.  and yet in the results section they have divied it up into < 4 months 
and older than 4 months, with a big gap between their next category of over 12 months.  How did 
that happen if they asked moms to recall within the original categories as stated?

They themselves stated that they used a smaller statistical power than many of the other studies 
and weakened the statistical power even further by using 5-6 categories.  

Basically, it was on of the hardest to follow set of tables I have ever seen.  

At one point buried in one section claim that this was a prospective study but they asked mothers 
of three year olds to recall their breastfeeding history and feeding history.  I would not call a 
period of recall of almost three years a prospective study! 

Having worked with many a mom who claims she is exclusively breastfeeding that upon further 
questioning actually turns out not to be exclusively breastfeeding (oh yeah, there is that bottle of 
formula to get the baby to sleep at night!) I'm not sure what to say about this one.  

Their data tables and recall periods are just plain and simple too messy and inconsistant and the 
recall period for me to feel comfortable judging anything about their conclusions.  It gave me so 
much of a headache trying to match up what they said in one section with what was written in 
another section and checking to see if the sample size added up, that I threw up my hands and 
gave up

Best regards, Susan E. Burger, MHS, PhD, IBCLC

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