Breast-feeding policy tends to be an emotive issue. International agencies recommend exclusive breast-feeding for 4-6 months followed by continued partial breast-feeding into the second year of life in order to promote infant and child health and minimize the damage caused by the malnutrition-infection cycle. To what extent are these recommendations supported by the experimental evidence? Are t...

OBJECTIVE To assess milk feeding on the maternity ward and during infancy, and their relationship to sociodemographic determinants. The validity of our 3-month questionnaire in measuring hospital feeding was assessed. DESIGN A prospective Finnish birth cohort with increased risk to type 1 diabetes recruited between 1996 and 2004. The families completed a follow-up form on the age at introduct...

INTRODUCTION This study records the prevalence and patterns of breastfeeding in Singaporean Chinese mothers who gave birth between 2000 and 2008. MATERIALS AND METHODS The Strabismus, Amblyopia and Refractive Error in Singaporean Children (STARS) study is a population-based survey conducted in South-Western Singapore. Disproportionate random sampling by 6-month age groups of Chinese children ...

OBJECTIVE Although bottle feeding is the main infant feeding mode in most societies, human milk is considered the most appropriate food for human infants. The aim of this study is to gather statistics regarding breast feeding prevalence, influencing factors for engaging in, and demographic characteristics of breast feeding in general population. METHODS This is a random cross-sectional questi...

OBJECTIVE We assessed the uptake of a nutritional intervention promoting exclusive breast-feeding with early cessation between 3 and 4 months of age to reduce postnatal transmission of HIV in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire. DESIGN Between March 2001 and March 2003, HIV-infected pregnant women who had received perinatal antiretroviral prophylaxis were systematically offered prenatally 2 infant feeding...

OBJECTIVE To determine the effect of cosmetic breast augmentation on subsequent infant feeding. PARTICIPANTS, DESIGN AND SETTING Population-based record linkage study of women giving birth in New South Wales, January 2006 - December 2011. Birth records were linked longitudinally to maternal hospitalisations up to 11 years before birth. Breast augmentation was identified by surgical procedure ...

Concentrations of HIV-1 RNA and DNA in mucosal compartments influence the risk of sexual transmission and mother-to-child transmission of HIV-1. Breast milk production is physiologically regulated such that supply is a function of infant demand, but whether demand also influences HIV-1 dynamics in breast milk is unknown. We tested whether minor and major changes in feeding frequency influence b...

BACKGROUND Chronic arsenic exposure causes a wide range of health effects, but little is known about critical windows of exposure. Arsenic readily crosses the placenta, but the few available data on postnatal exposure to arsenic via breast milk are not conclusive. AIM Our goal was to assess the arsenic exposure through breast milk in Bangladeshi infants, living in an area with high prevalence...

Protection against neonatal sepsis by breast feeding was investigated in a developing community. A case-control study was carried out with 42 cases from a hospital and 270 controls, matched for age and socioeconomic conditions from the community. Exclusive breast feeding was extremely rare, most babies being partially breast fed and a few being given formula feed or animal milk. A highly signif...