Oooh good comparison Rachael. I spent this afternoon trawling thought the
papers used in their meta analysis and did not find decent breastfeeding
definitions (there was even an old never vs ever!) so it was not good all
round...actually what was slopping IMO was not so much the paper but the
review process that it actually go published and without the authors having
to discuss the limitations of not factoring in reliable breastfeeding
dosages! That is the real shame!
I really like your smoking analogy. A comment I sent to another list this
morning was that one would not expect that research looking at the impact of
eating vegetables on health would be useful if it was comparing a group of
non-vegetable eaters who ate McDonalds every day and a group of vegetable
eaters who ate McDonalds 6 days a week and vegetables on one day would be
useful. Similarly, you cannot expect that token breastfeeding can wipe out
the impact of predominant formula feeding. I can't believe that 15+ years
after Miriam Labbok published her paper about the need for care in
breastfeeding definitions that we still have papers like this coming
through!
Karleen Gribble
Australia
----- Original Message -----
From: "Rachel Myr" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, October 05, 2006 8:02 PM
Subject: BMJ article on effects of sort of breastfeeding
> No rapid responses to this article have been published yet. I've just
sent
> one, after reading the definition of breastfeeding (called 'breast
feeding'
> in the BMJ) in the article, which I present here for your collective
> amusement.
> 'Breast feeding - women who had had a child since the previous interview
> were asked whether they breast fed the child at all, and, if so, how old
the
> child was when they stoppped breast feeding. In most cases this
information
> would have been obtained within a year of the birth. Even so, reports on
> duration of breast feeding were probably less reliable than reports of
> whether a child was breast fed or not.'
>
> So, all we know about the breastfeeding in this population is what the
> mothers stated, coded into breastfeeding or not breastfeeding, without
> respect to exclusivity.
>
> In my response, I said that drawing conclusions about the effect of
> breastfeeding based on such a distinction is like drawing conclusions
about
> the effect of not smoking in a population where some people claimed to
have
> smoked continuously, while others said they smoked partially,
occasionally,
> or intensively for short periods.
>
> I encourage anyone on Lactnet who so desires, to use this comparison when
> discussing this article with others. While we do need studies to clarify
to
> what degree the effects of breastfeeding on cognitive functioning are
> separate from the effects of having a mother who performs well on a test
of
> cognitive functioning, 'Effect of breast feeding on intelligence in
> children: prospective study, sibling pairs analysis, and meta-analysis' by
> Der, Batty and Deary in this week's issue of the BMJ is not one of them.
>
> Rachel Myr
> Kristiansand, Norway
>
>
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