Исследование опровергло миф о том, что грудное вскармливание мешает новорожденным спать

Through no fault of your own, it’s possible to be misled by a headline. A recently reported story is a great example. The headline that appeared online and in most newspapers that covered the research was along the lines of: Breast milk, best sleep: Nationwide Japanese study finds. Looking at this headline, you would naturally expect that if you wanted your newborn to get the best sleep possible then you should be breast feeding them, but that’s not what the study showed or what it was designed to prove! A Japanese researcher with a three-year-old child wondered if she’d done the right thing feeding her as a newborn. She’d been told that breastfed babies wake up more often and therefore don’t sleep as long between feedings because breast milk is more easily digested and so the baby gets hungrier sooner. But had anyone ever checked if that was true? She and her team decided to do that. In Japan there’s an ongoing research project, the Japan Environment and Children Study (JECS) that has enrolled over 100,000 mothers and their babies and has been following them. Of that number, more than 82,000 mother-infant pairs had information on how the babies had been fed during the first six months of life, and how they slept at one year of age. Based on the U.S. National Sleep Foundation recommendations, they used 11 hours of sleep per day as the goal. They divided the women into four groups: - only fed their newborn with formula for the first six months of life - breastfed but for less than six months - breastfed during the first six months, but also used formula supplementation - exclusively breastfed for the six months. Contrary to what she’d been told, all the groups that were breastfed were more likely (not less likely) than those newborns who’d been formula-fed to get at least the 11 hours of recommended sleep. But the difference between the breastfed and the exclusively formula-fed infants though it sounded impressive statistically, was practically insignificant. There was only a very small difference between the groups. So, rather than proving that breastfed babies slept longer, what it really proved was that it made no significant difference whether the baby was breastfed or formula-fed in terms of their getting enough sleep. Being fed only breast milk didn’t make the baby wake up more often because they were hungry, which is exactly what the researcher was trying to figure out, but that’s not what you’d have learned from the headline! This is yet another reason why you must be careful about what a headline says or what you find in social media and online, especially when the topic is medical. You often will have to go more deeply into the article or have someone with some medical knowledge tease out the truth behind the headline. The decision whether to breast feed is one that a woman should be able to make based on facts and their specific situation. The World Health Organization (WHO) among many others does recommend breast feeding an infant for the first six months of life if that’s possible, but there are many valid reasons why that might not be doable or even best for the mother and the newborn. The belief that breast feeding will make the baby sleep less (or more!) shouldn’t have a role in deciding what’s best for Mom and baby, because now you know the facts. Dr. Mitch Shulman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine at McGill Medical School as well as an Attending Physician in the Emergency Department of the McGill University Health Centre. He’s also the CJAD AM 800 Medical Consultant. n