The researchers of this week’s study were interested in exploring whether people who were breastfed have a lower risk of all-cause mortality as adults. They report that previous research on this topic failed to find an association, but the studies were small, with less than 4000 participants.
The researchers used data from the UK Biobank, that recruited over 500,000 people in England, Scotland, and Wales between 2006-2010. This study only included BioBank participants who were over 40 years of age and who had known whether they were breastfed or not during infancy.
As you can imagine, there are many other life factors that impact mortality rates, and many of these were controlled for, including ethnicity, sex, smoking, education, BMI, alcohol intake, physical activity, and healthy diet score.
The researchers also conducted a meta-analysis, by pooling the results from this study with previous studies on the association between breastfeeding and mortality.
Among the subjects enrolled with the UK BioBank, 25,581 deaths were recorded over 10 years of follow up. Breastfeeding during infancy was associated with a hazard ratio of 0.95, or a 5% lower risk of all-cause mortality in middle and late adulthood. The authors found similar findings in the meta-analysis.
Beth Lichy
Maybe I missed this: how long were the study recipients Breastfeeding to show an effect? Any correlation between length of breastfeeding and mortality rates?
IABLE
This study only looked at a history of ‘ever breastfed’. They were likely unable to measure the duration of breastfeeding because these people were adults when enrolled in the study.