Breast-feeding may cut diabetes risk in child: Pima Indian population.(Obstetrics)

STANFORD, CALIF. -- Women may lower the chances of their children eventually developing diabetes by exclusively breast-feeding them for 2 months or more during infancy, if data from studies in Pima Indians hold up in other populations, Dr. David J. Pettitt said at a conference on perinatal and pediatric nutrition.

His studies of diabetes in Pima Indians have found a number of associations between maternal diabetes, breast-feeding or bottle-feeding, and diabetes in offspring.

Surveys of Pima Indians found that offspring who were exclusively breast-fed for at least 2 months in infancy were much less likely to develop diabetes over time. By ages 20-24 years, 5% of breast-fed offspring developed diabetes compared with 15% of bottle-fed offspring, said Dr. Pettitt of Sansum Medical Research Institute, Santa Barbara, Calif.

Overall, bottle-feeding doubled the rate of diabetes in offspring compared with exclusively breast-feeding for 2 or more months--10% vs. 5%--after adjusting for other factors that contribute to the risk for diabetes including age, birth date, sex, obesity, birth weight, parental diabetes, and maternal diabetes in pregnancy, he said at the meeting, jointly sponsored by Symposia Medicus and Stanford University.

The 50% reduction in diabetes with breast-feeding occurred mainly in offspring of women who were not diabetic during pregnancy--the large majority of women in this study. Smaller benefits were seen in offspring of women with diabetes during pregnancy: approximately a 20% reduction with breast-feeding compared with bottle-feeding, which produced diabetes in 40% of offspring after adjusting for other risk factors. That 20% difference was not statistically significant, probably because of the small sample size, Dr. Pettitt said.

"If this were to hold up in a much larger sample, then it's possible that by getting women who have ...