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Breastfeeding and Healthy Lung Development Study

by kate baggott on November 1st, 2007

There is an interesting study about asthma and breastfeeding in the first November issue of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.  Breastfed babies having less diarrhea, fewer ear infections and fewer incidents of wheezing in infancy. The new study suggests that the breastfed babies of asthmatic mothers, though, may be missing out on the positive effects of breastfeeding on lung development.

<>“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 Arizona Respiratory Center at the University of Arizona. “However, longer breastfeeding in children of mother with asthma demonstrates no improved lung growth and significant decrease in airflows later in life.”

In the study of 1,246 infants who monitored from birth through adolescence.

There was complete disclosure of how 679 of the infants were fed. When each of the participant’s lung function was tested using spirometry (a device that measures the strength of inhalation compared to the strength of exhalation) when they were between the ages of 11 and 16, the researchers looked for correlations between their lungs’ performance and how they were fed as infants.

When analyzed as a whole, the researchers found that airflow was better in breastfed children as a whole. However, when the data of children whose mothers had allergies or asthma was analyzed separately, their children did not have the lower airflows than the children infants with asthmatic or allergic mothers. Lower airflows are a benefit as asthma and allergies tend to encourage an over-reaction and hyperventilation.

“Breast fed children with non-atopic and non-asthmatic mothers had an increase in lung volume and no decrease in their airflows,” wrote Dr. Guilbert. “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.”

Why could this be? Dr. Guilbert thinks the breast milk of non-asthmatic mothers may contain certain factors that promote healthy lung development. The breast milk of asthmatic mothers may not contain as much, or enough, of these factors that haven’t been identified.
“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,” wrote Dr. Guilbert.

That doesn’t mean that asthmatic mothers should stop breastfeeding their children.

“Human milk is uniquely suited to the feeding of infants, having been subject to selective pressures for millennia,” Dr. Guilbert wrote. “It is premature to suggest any change in breastfeeding recommendations based on one study, particularly given the multiple well-documented benefits of breastfeeding.”

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POSTED IN: Breastfeeding