Breast-feeding curbs obesity in at-risk kids
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Women who develop diabetes during pregnancy are liable to have large babies, which in turn can lead to obesity in childhood—but that chain of events may be interrupted if the mother breast-feeds, researchers report.
Diabetes that develops during pregnancy is termed gestational diabetes mellitus or GDM. “In a recent study of infants of mothers who had GDM, we demonstrated that parental obesity and excessive intrauterine growth resulting in neonatal overweight independently contribute to early childhood obesity,” Dr. Ute M. Schaefer-Graf and colleagues explain in the medical journal Diabetes Care.
For their current study, the researchers from Vivantes Medical Center and Charite University Medical Center in Berlin, Germany, examined the association between breast-feeding and being overweight in early childhood in the same group of 324 children.
Women with GDM who participated in the Diabetes Prenatal Care Clinic of Vivantes Medical Center between 1995 and 2000 were asked to return with their children when they were between 2 and 8 years of age. The mothers were also asked about patterns of breast-feeding.
Two hundred forty-one mothers (74 percent) reported that they breast-fed their infants. Seventy-seven infants (24 percent) were breast-fed for up to 3 months, and 164 (50 percent) were breast-fed for more than 3 months.
Ninety-two children (28 percent) were overweight. The shorter the duration of breast-feeding, the higher the children’s body mass index or BMI, the investigators found.
Of the children who were not breast-fed, 37 percent were overweight; that compared with 32 percent of children breast-fed for up to 3 months, and 22 percent for those breast-fed longer than 3 months.
After adjusting for confounding factors, Schaefer-Graf and colleagues found that in infants who were breast-fed for more than 3 months, the risk of becoming overweight in early childhood was reduced by up to 50 percent.
The investigators also found that women with GDM who were obese were less likely to breast-feed their infants.
These findings suggest that obese women with GDM should be encouraged to breast-feed for 3 months or longer if possible to reduce the risk of their kids becoming obese.
SOURCE: Diabetes Care, May 2006.
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