More mother's milk for mental growth

Breastfeeding babies for less than three months may affect their intelligence, according to research.

Medical experts at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology tested the intellectual and motor skills of 345 children at 13 months and then five years of age.

Nearly two-thirds were breastfed for six months or more but 17 per cent were moved to bottle-feeding at less than three months old.

The team, led by Dr Torstein Vik, found no correlation between breastfeeding and motor skills at either age.

But those who were not given breast milk after three months were more likely to rate below average for mental skills at 13 months and for total intelligence by the age of five.

The findings, which support the "breast is best" advice given by most doctors, were released in the Archives of Disease in Childhood, a specialist publication of the British Medical Journal.

"We found a positive association between duration of breastfeeding and mental development even after adjusting for maternal age, maternal education, maternal intelligence and smoking at the time of conception," the researchers' paper concluded.

"Our data supports the hypothesis that a longer duration of breastfeeding benefits cognitive development," it said.

A mother's milk is full of special nutrients, hormones and antibodies that are passed on to infants to help them to resist infections, respiratory illness and diarrhoea.

Breastfeeding is especially recommended in developing countries, where the risk of death is higher for infants not given mother's milk during their first three to four months.

- REUTERS