News article

New randomized trial links hospital practices with breastfeeding success and childhood intelligence

May 15, 2008

A new study out this month found that hospital practices that support breastfeeding boost a child’s IQ at six years of age.

The PROBIT trial randomized hospitals in Belarus to follow pro-breastfeeding guidelines or traditional hospital practice. Mothers who delivered at the breastfeeding-friendly hospitals had much longer durations of total and exclusive breastfeeding, and their children had both higher IQs and better school performance in first grade.

The authors of the study note that it is the largest ever conducted in the lactation field. It provides strong evidence that prolonged and exclusive breastfeeding improves children’s cognitive development.

Numerous studies have linked breastfeeding with intelligence, but they have been limited by concerns that more intelligent mothers, or mothers who are better educated, might also be more likely to breastfeed. Critics have argued that these factors, rather than breastfeeding itself, were responsible for higher intelligence scores in breastfed children.

In the current study, however, hospitals were randomly assigned to World Health Organization practices that support breastfeeding. In this type of study, there should be no differences in intelligence or education between the mothers who did or did not get extra breastfeeding support. In fact, mothers at the pro-breastfeeding hospitals completed slightly less education than mothers at the control hospitals. If anything, this difference would decrease the estimated effect of breastfeeding on intelligence

Mothers who gave birth at the hospitals modeled on the WHO Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative (BFHI) breastfed exclusively for much longer than the other mothers. At 3 months, 43% of BFHI mothers were giving only breast milk, compared to just 6.4% from the other hospitals. The number of children breastfeeding at 12 months was almost double in the babies born at the BFHI-modeled hospitals.

Worldwide, more than 19,000 maternity hospitals participate in the Baby Friendly Initiative, helping to boost breastfeeding rates and improve health around the globe. Only 63 of more than 3,000 US maternity hospitals participate in the program.

“American hospitals are shortchanging mothers,” said Dr. Alison Stuebe, a Boston OB-GYN and member of MBC. “These results suggest that the vast majority of American babies could be giving up six IQ points because their mothers aren’t receiving appropriate breastfeeding support immediately after birth.”

This study further supports existing evidence that hospital practices can significantly impact breastfeeding through the first year of life – and perhaps more significantly, impact health outcomes far into the future.

Read more about the study.