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Breast-feeding could decrease ADHD risk
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Children who are breast-fed at aged 3 months were less likely to develop attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, according to recent study results published in Breastfeeding Medicine.
“In this study, we showed that children with ADHD tend to have a lower rate of breast-feeding at any time during the first year of life and tend to breast-feed for shorter periods than non-ADHD siblings and than a control group of non-related, non-ADHD children,” researchers wrote. “Specifically, fewer children in the ADHD group were still breast-feeding beyond 3 months of age compared with the infants in both control groups.”
The retrospective, matched study included children aged 6 to 12 years diagnosed at Schneider’s Children Medical Center in Israel with ADHD in 2008 and 2009 who were compared with two control groups (siblings without ADHD and children without ADHD).
Researchers found that in children diagnosed with ADHD, 43% were breast-fed at aged 3 months compared with 69% in the sibling group and 73% in the non-related group (P=.002). At aged 6 months, 29% of those with ADHD were breast-fed compared with 50% in the sibling group and 57% in the non-related group (P=.011).
“Whether the lesser exposure to breast-feeding in ADHD children is casually associated with ADHD or, on the contrary, a consequence of early abnormalities of feeding behavior at the breast cannot be determined from the current study,” researchers wrote. “We speculate that prevention, at least partial, of ADHD may be added to the list of the multiple biological advantages of human milk feeding.”
Disclosure: The researchers report no relevant financial disclosures.
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