Studies Miss Key Information That Could Encourage Longer Breastfeeding.

2001 AUG 23 - (NewsRx Network) -- Breastfeeding children for longer periods can improve their health, and researchers have carried out dozens of studies to promote that practice and discourage early termination of breastfeeding. Nevertheless, that research may be overlooking key information, according to a research article published recently in the Pan American Journal of Public Health.

In a research project in the Dominican Republic, Dr. John McLennan, of the Canadian Centre for Studies of Children at Risk, at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario, found that Dominican mothers, asked why they ended breastfeeding early, gave responses similar to ones that many other researchers have found. But when they were also asked why mothers in the community ended breastfeeding, they reported "fear of loss of figure or of breast shape" and "not wanting to breast feed" much more frequently.

These noticeable differences came to light when the Dominican mothers gave answers as to what they perceived for mothers in their community. Some of these "community" reasons have been much less frequently reported in other research studies, noted McLennan.

One of the differences had to do with the mothers' concerns about losing their body figure or breast shape. While not a single woman in the survey listed this as a reason of her own for stopping breastfeeding early, 29% of the women who had stopped breastfeeding in less in a year gave that answer as a "community" reason. McLennan noted that while this is a concern familiar to people working directly with mothers and trying to encourage them to breastfeed, this is the first time that this reason has been reported in scientific literature as a possible factor influencing the duration of breastfeeding.

Up to this point, most studies looking at why new mothers stop breastfeeding have depended on mothers' reporting their own reasons for stopping, or the research has looked at such characteristics as the mother's age or the age of the child when bottle feeding was begun. While ...