On Wednesday 16 July 2003 00:03 am, Sara Reuning wrote:
> > Seriously, though, has anyone thought
> > about looking at rates of cancer of kids within the LLLL population?
> >  It would be retrospective, of course, but the definition of BF
> > should be fairly consistent with a high rate of *actual* BF.

To which Kathy Boggs said:
> What a great idea, Sarah!

Possibly.  Looking retroactively within the LLL population would
certainly give you a cohort of babies who had a substantially higher
percentage of babies who exclusively breastfed for the first several
months of life.

At the same time, though, one could wind up with a lot of confounding
factors that could really kill the credibility of the results.

One of the major difficulties with breastmilk vs. formula research is
that it would be/is virtually impossible and rather unethical to
randomize participants.  So by nature, such studies are going to have to
be longitudinal studies and/or retroactive analyses.  In these, there is
so much to control for including but not limited to demographics,
socioeconomic status, amount of breastfeeding, duration of
breastfeeding, what kinds of solids were introduced, maternal diet,
lifestyle features, etc.

And I've seen at least one study that demonstrated that the percentage
of breastfeeding made a difference in the variable being evaluated.  One
study by Raisler, Alexander, & O'Campo (1999) which classified infant
feeding into exclusively breastfed, more breastmilk than formula, equal
breastmilk/formula, more formula than breastmilk, and exclusively
formula found a dose-related effect... in fact, infants who got more
formula than breastmilk did not have any reduced odds of the illnesses
examined in the study and those who got half breastmilk/half formula
only had minimal odds reduction.  It would not surprise me if the same
were true in reference to cancer.... but trying to set up such a study
would be challenging.

Just a few thoughts that I felt a need to add...

--
Elisa H. Casey, RN BSN
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