Truck and Barter

According to a new study;

“Social epidemiologist Yvonne J. Kelly of University College London and her colleagues were aware of studies that had suggested neurological benefits from breastfeeding. However, notes Kelly, those earlier analyses tended to be small and done in special populations—such as preemies. They also failed to rule out many factors that might account for differences in a child's developmental skills. Among such possible confounders: race, parent's education, family income, parenting attitudes, depression in the mother, characteristics of childcare, or the baby's overall health.

Kelly and her coauthors had access to information on such features for the families of 18,000 infants from throughout the United Kingdom. The scientists also had motor-development data from in-home interviews with the families of those children when each baby was between 8 and 11 months old. The data were collected as part of the still-ongoing Millennium Cohort Study begun in 2000.

Among these children, 9 percent exhibited gross motor delays, which means being late in reaching such major milestones as sitting up, proficient crawling, or standing. Six percent also showed delays in fine-motor coordination—such as clapping hands, transferring an object from one hand to another, or efficiently using the thumb and forefinger like pincers to pick things up. Only 1 percent of the infants showed both types of delays, the scientists report in the September Pediatrics.

When the researchers began their work, they were skeptical of a link between breastfeeding and motor skills. "Although we thought we'd initially see some kind of effect, we had expected to be able to later explain it all away when we [adjusted for] covariants," such as a family's income or mother's mental health, Kelly says.

To the researchers' surprise, Kelly notes, children "were about 50 percent less likely to have a [developmental] delay if they had prolonged, exclusive breastfeeding when compared to those who were never breastfed." They defined breastfeeding as prolonged when it had lasted at least 4 months. Even babies receiving mother's milk for a short while—2 months or less—were 30 percent less likely to have a developmental delay than those who received solely infant formula, beginning right after birth…”

Related;
The Allen brain atlas