Breast Is Best But for How Long?


Updated 8:06 PM ET March 15, 2001
By Patricia Reaney
LONDON (Reuters) - Breast is still best for young babies but scientists are
now questioning for how long.

Mother's milk is full of special nutrients, hormones and antibodies that are
passed on to infants to help them to resist infections, respiratory illness
and diarrhea.

But new research reported on Friday by doctors at the Institute of Child
Health has raised questions about the optimal duration for breast feeding.

Professor Alan Lucas and his team have found that young adults who had been
breastfed for more than four months have stiffer arteries, an early marker
of heart disease, than people who had been bottle fed or breast fed for a
shorter time.

"The longer the duration of breastfeeding the stiffer we found arteries to
be in 20-28 year-old men and women," Lucas told Reuters.

But the flexibility of arteries was the same in people who had never been
breast fed and those who were nursed for less than four months.

WOMEN SHOULD STILL BREAST FEED

The doctors stressed that their findings, reported in The British Medical
Journal, are purely observational and they have not established a causal
link.

They recommended that women continue to breast feed their babies because of
the advantages it has for both the child and mother.

"There are many pluses for breast feeding," said Lucas.

"We need to do more work on the optimal duration of breast feeding for
people in the West, and we need to do more work on whether there are other
things we can do, like changing diet in adulthood, that could remove this
risk altogether."

All of the 331 people who took part in the study were young so the results
are less likely to be related to other risk factors for heart disease such
as smoking, social class and size.

"We took a range of factors that we measured during this study and found
that none of those things explained the relationship between breast feeding
duration and later artery stiffness," Lucas added.

Although the researchers have not established the mechanism by which breast
milk could lead to arterial stiffness, one theory they have put forward is
that breast milk was not meant to get babies started in life and then take
up a high-fat Western diet.

Lucas said that results of animal studies support the theory.

Ian Booth, of the University of Birmingham in England, said the study should
not alter the current recommendations for breast feeding which suggest that
women nurse their babies for the first four to six months of life.

Breast feeding is particularly important in developing countries where it is
vital for infant survival and health.

"Independent corroboration in different populations is required before the
potential impact of these observations can be assessed," Booth said in a
commentary on the

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