Research

Breastfed babies cope better with stress

Breastfed babies are more resilient as they cope better with stress in later life than bottle fed babies, suggests researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. The findings are based on almost 9000 children and are published ahead of print in "Archives of Disease in Childhood".

The children were part of the 1970 British Cohort Study, which regularly monitors a sample of the British population from birth onwards. Relevant information was obtained at the children's birth, and at the ages of 5 and 10 years, from midwives and health visitors, parents, and teachers.

This included data on how much the child weighed at birth and whether s/he was breastfed, as well as factors that might influence or linked with a child's reaction to stress and coping mechanisms, including maternal depression, parental education levels, their social class, and smoking habits.

Teachers were also asked to rate the anxiety of their pupils when the children were 10 years old on a scale of zero to 50, while parents were interviewed about major family disruption, including divorce or separation, which had occurred when their child was between 5 and 10 years of age.

Unsurprisingly, when all the data were analysed, the findings pointed to a greater likelihood of high anxiety among children whose parents had divorced or separated. But children who had been breastfed were significantly less anxious than their peers who had not been breastfed. Bottle fed children were much more likely to be anxious if their parents divorced than breast fed children. This difference is highly statistically significant.

The authors emphasise that their research does not prove that breastfeeding itself makes children cope better with life stress; rather, it may be a marker of some other maternal or parental factors, they say. They cite animal research, which suggests that the quality of physical contact between mother and baby during the first few days of life may influence the development of the offspring's neural and hormonal pathways that are involved in the stress response. Babies with more of the type of contact experienced during breast feeding cope better with stress when they are older.

Breastfeeding may also affect the quality of the bonding between mother and child and the way in which the two relate to each other, which may have a lasting impact on the childs anxiety levels in response to stressful life events, the authors suggest.

This research was funded though the ESRC Capability and Resilience Network.