According to a new study published this week in the open journal PLoS One by Rene é Pereyra El í as, Maria Quigley and Claire Carson of the University of Oxford in the UK, even after controlling for socio-economic status and mothers' cognitive abilities, breastfeeding time is associated with an increase in cognitive scores between the ages of 5 and 14**
Although causality remains controversial, previous studies have found an association between breastfeeding and standardized intelligence test scores. The improvement in cognitive outcomes may be explained by other characteristics, such as socio-economic and the intelligence of breastfeeding women.
In the new study, scientists analyzed data on 7855 babies born between 2000 and 2002, who were tracked to the age of 14 as part of the UK Millennium Cohort Study. Although not specifically designed to investigate the relationship between breastfeeding and cognition, the cohort included data on any breastfeeding time, exclusive breastfeeding time, language cognitive scores at the ages of 5 / 7 / 11 and 14, spatial cognitive scores at the ages of 5 / 7 and 11, and potential confounding factors, including socio-economic characteristics and maternal cognition based on vocabulary tests.
Unadjusted associations found that longer breastfeeding time was associated with higher language scores for all ages under 14 and higher spatial cognitive scores for all ages under 11. After taking into account the differences in socio-economic status and mother's cognitive ability, children who breastfed for a long time scored higher on cognitive ability tests before the age of 14 than those who did not breastfeed. Longer breastfeeding time was associated with an average cognitive score that was 0.08 to 0.26 standard deviations higher than the average cognitive score of children who had never breastfed. This difference may be small for individual children, but it may be very important in the population.
The researchers concluded that after adjusting for socio-economic and maternal intelligence, a modest association between breastfeeding time and cognitive scores remained.
"There is some debate about whether longer breastfeeding improves cognitive development in infants. In the UK, women with more educational qualifications and economic advantages tend to breastfeed longer. In addition, this group tends to score higher on cognitive tests. These differences may explain why infants who breastfeed longer performed better in cognitive assessment. However, in our study, Even taking these differences into account, we found that children who breastfed for a long time scored higher on cognitive tests before the age of 14 than those who did not breastfeed. This difference may be small for individual children, but it may be important in the population, "they continued.