Prevent Disease.com - Breast-Feeding Cuts Riskof Respiratory Disease



		Breast-Feeding Cuts Risk of Respiratory Disease Excerpt By Melissa Schorr, Reuters Health SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters Health) - Healthy children who are breast-fed are one-third less likely to develop a lower respiratory tract infection compared with bottle-fed babies, according to a review of the medical literature presented here Monday at the American Academy of Pediatricians' annual meeting. ``If you breast-feed for at least 4 months, your child will experience one-third the risk of hospitalization for lower respiratory disease,'' lead author Dr. Virginia Bachrach, a community pediatrician in Palo Alto, California, told Reuters Health. The protection seems to last for the first year of life, Bachrach noted. Bachrach said that 6% of all US infants less than 1 year of age are hospitalized annually for lower respiratory tract disease, which elevates their risk for later illnesses such as asthma and creates a costly healthcare burden. Bachrach reviewed 31 published and unpublished studies on the effect of breast-feeding on lower respiratory tract disease. After eliminating studies to those that only look at healthy infants who had been exclusively breast-fed for at least 4 months living in developed areas, the researchers pooled the data from 5,000 infants in seven studies. The investigators found that children who were not breast-fed exclusively had a threefold greater risk of suffering a lower respiratory tract disease. The results were still significant after taking into account possible contributing factors, such as the women's socioeconomic levels and smoking, Bachrach noted. Children who are breast-fed receive a boost to their immune systems from their mothers, which may help them ward off infectious viruses that cause respiratory illness, she suggested. ``If public policy supported women to breast-feed beyond the newborn period, infant hospitalizations rates would decrease,'' she said. Reference Source 89 For more information on how to prevent other diseases, use PreventDisease.com's "Quick Prevention Resources".