thought everyone might find this interesting.

katherine wilson-thompson
Mom to Alexandra 7 and Nicholas 4
WIC Breastfeeding Peer Counselor

Baby Formula, Hypertension Linked

By EMMA ROSS
.c The Associated Press


LONDON (AP) - Babies fed infant formula grow up to have higher blood
pressure than those given breast milk, new research suggests.

The findings, to be published Saturday in The Lancet medical journal, come
from the first experimental study of how early nutrition influences blood
pressure, a predictor of heart disease risk later in life.

Earlier studies have noted that adults with high blood pressure tended to
have been fed formula as babies. But none took account of scores of other
factors that raise blood pressure, such as a bad diet in adulthood, stress
and lack of exercise.

Experts say the results bolster the theory that an infant's diet influences
the risk of several diseases in adulthood. Breast-feeding is also considered
better for children's intelligence.

The study by scientists at the Institute of Child Health in London involved
pre-term babies, who are sometimes not strong enough to suck or may need a
more concentrated formula.

That also eliminated the ethical problem of experimenting with healthy
full-term babies whose mothers can easily breast-feed exclusively.

``When you put this together with the two observational studies linking
formula to higher blood pressure in full-term babies, there's a strong
possibility these results would apply to healthy full-term babies,'' said
one of the researchers, Dr. Alan Lucas, a professor of pediatrics at the
Institute of Child Health.

Nearly 20 years ago, the researchers randomly divided 216 pre-term babies
into three groups: one received donated breast milk, one received infant
formula made for pre-term babies and the third received regular infant
formula. Each diet, begun within 48 hours of birth, was used as a sole food
or as a supplement to mother's milk, depending on what the mother wanted to
do.

The infants remained in the study until they weighed enough to go home,
usually after one month. The children then returned about 16 years later to
have their blood pressure measured. There were two comparisons. One compared
breast milk with pre-term formula, and the other compared pre-term formula
with full-term formula.

``Just one month of one diet rather than another had a major impact,'' Lucas
said. ``We created a situation where the only difference between them was
what they were fed in the first month of life.''

The scientists found that the diastolic blood pressure reading - the lower
number - was 3.2 points lower in the teens fed breast milk than in those
given pre-term formula. The systolic reading - the higher number - was 2.7
points lower. An elevation in either reading is bad.

Within the formula-fed group, babies on the highest proportion of formula to
mother's milk ended up with the highest blood pressure.

There was no difference in blood pressure between the groups fed pre-term
formula and regular formula, which contain different nutrients.

The results were not related to birth weight, the study said.

``These few millimeters may look small, but it's a large effect,'' Lucas
said.

Major American heart disease studies have found that if adults' diastolic
blood pressure was lowered just two points, the prevalence of high blood
pressure would drop by 17 percent, the risk of heart disease would fall by 6
percent and the risk of stroke and heart attacks would drop by 15 percent,
he noted.

``The most likely thing is there's something in breast milk that protects,''
Lucas said.

Identifying the specific differences in the composition of human milk and
commercial formula that produced the difference in blood pressure is
important for making better infant formula, said Susan Roberts, an expert at
Tufts University's Human Nutrition Research Center in Boston, who was not
connected with the study.

The study discounted any relation between high blood pressure among teens
and sodium and total fat in the infant milk or formula, she noted.

AP-NY-02-08-01 1901EST

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