Scientists have found evidence to prove that breastfeeding helps with much better development of brains of infants. This is another incentive to continue to breastfeed your baby instead of making use of baby formulae. According to a new study that has been published by a team of researchers from Brown University, MRI images of the brains of infants taken when they were sleeping sowed that the brains of babies who were fed only on their mother’s milk were far more developed than the brains of babies who were fed on a mix of formula and mother’s milk or fed on formulae alone.
Advertisement
In fact, the better development of the brain was found when the babies were fed on a combination of mother’s milk and
formula than when they were fed formula alone. But the best development of brain parts took place when babies were fed mother’s milk alone. Researchers made use of a magnetic Resonance Imaging facility that was baby friendly and did not interfere with their sleeping patterns while recording their brain images. The study was conducted on babies up to the age of 4. It was found that by the time babies reached the age of 2, the babies who were fed exclusively for the first three months of their lives with their mother’s milk showed much more developed parts of brains in comparison to babies who received formula in addition to their mother’s milk
Developed brains when babies are fed mother’s milk exclusively
What this study corroborates is the fact that breastfeeding completely for the first three months in the life of an infant means that his brain is 20-30% more developed than others who are fed on a combination of mother’s milk and milk formula. The study was titled Breastfeeding and Early White Matter Development: A Cross-Sectional Study. It got published in the June 6 issue of the journal called Nero Image. In most of the studies that have been conducted on this subject earlier, scientists have mainly confined themselves to better cognitive abilities for babies that have been breastfed. There have also been studies that led to a conclusion that babies exclusively breastfed have been found to do well in school than kids who are given a combination of mother’s milk and formula.
White matter development is stimulated by mother’s milk
This is the first study of its kind in the sense that it made of MRI on young babies. The study found a difference of 20-30% in the quantity of white matter in the two groups of babies who had been ether totally breast fed in the first three months of the lives or had been given a combination of mother’s milk and formula. Scientists themselves are astounded by the results saying they could not assume this much of a difference in white matter development on account of milk.
Advertisement
The team of researchers conducted MRI on a group of 133 babies that belonged to different ages from 10 months to 4 years. All babies came from families of similar socioeconomic backgrounds.
