My local news ran a story on this this am, someone just found the article they 
were referring to for me. (I had called the news station and they would not tell 
me) 
So I admit my weakness is research, so can someone who is good at 
interpreting the study info let me know what they think of this?

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,307341,00.html

Breast-feeding has been known to have some advantages over the bottle—
fewer ear infections, less diarrhea and fewer incidents of wheezing early in life.

Now, researchers have found that babies who are breast-fed for more than 
four months will have better lung function and breathe easier into their 
adolescent years as long as their mothers don’t have asthma or allergies.

Researchers at the Arizona Respiratory Center studied data from infants who 
were enrolled since birth and monitored through their adolescence in the 
Children’s Respiratory Study.

Click here to read more

Of the 679 participants who completed the data on infant-feeding and were 
tested for lung function between the ages of 11- and 16-years-old, overall, 
breast-fed children had good lung function into their teens.

However, more breathing problems associated with breast-feeding were only 
found in children of mothers with asthma or allergies.

“These findings suggest that growth factors in milk have the potential to 
modify lung development, which might account for some of the protective 
effect of breastfeeding against wheeze,” said Theresa W. Guilbert, M.D., of 
the Arizona Respiratory Center at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Ariz.

Guilbert said that a mother’s breast milk may contain certain factors that 
promote lung development. What, specifically, is still unknown.

“Longer breastfeeding in infancy is associated with improved lung function in 
later childhood with minimal effects on airflow in children of non-asthmatic 
mothers,” wrote Theresa W. Guilbert, M.D., of the University of Wisconsin-
Madison and the Arizona Respiratory Center at the University of Arizona in 
Tucson. “However, longer breastfeeding in children of mother with asthma 
demonstrates no improved lung growth and significant decrease in airflows 
later in life.”

She added, “Breast-fed children with non-atopic and non-asthmatic mothers 
had an increase in lung volume and no decrease in their airflows. However, 
children of mothers with asthma who were breastfed four months or more did 
not demonstrate any improvement in lung volume. Further, they had a 
significant reduction in airflows, suggesting that the risk for increased asthma 
in children of asthmatic mothers may be partly due to altered lung growth.”

The study is in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, 
which is published by the American Thoracic Society.

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