Growth & Development: Recent Developmental Studies

Over the years a number of other studies have looked at this question. Ten studies have been published in the last twenty years evaluating between 200 and 13,000 babies. The authors of these papers include:

• Rodgers, 1978 ,
• Fergusson, 1982 ,
• Taylor, 1984 ,
• Morrow-Tlucak, 1988 ,
• Rogan, 1993 ,
• Du V Florey, 1995 ,
• Niemela, 1996 ,
• Horwood, 1998 ,
• Jacobson, 1999 ,
• Mortensen, 2002 and
• Clark, 2006 .

Consistencies among these studies

1. All except the Clark study were done in the developed world.

2. All of the authors attempted to control for the socioeconomic status of the mothers.

3. All of the studies were secondary data analyses of existing information.

Results

1. All of these studies found that the mental development of the breast fed babies was slightly better than those who were fed formula or not breast fed.

2. The difference was statistically significant in all studies except the Jacobson study. The Jacobson study found that children who were breast fed in infancy had significantly higher scores on developmental tests after adjusting for social class and education. However the difference disappeared after adjusting for maternal IQ and parenting skills ( Jacobson, 1999 ).

3. The clinical importance of this difference (a range of 2 to 5 points on tests with a norm of 100) may be more important in a public health aspect than for each individual child.