It's one more potential benefit for breast-fed babies, research suggests
By Carrie Myers
HealthDay Reporter
MONDAY, June 1, 2015 (HealthDay News) -- Breast-feeding -- even for a short time -- may lower a baby's later risk of childhood leukemia, a new study suggests.
The researchers found that babies breast-fed for at
least six months appear to have a 19 percent lower risk of childhood
leukemia compared to children who were never breast-fed or were
breast-fed for fewer months.
"Breast-feeding is a highly accessible and low-cost
preventive public health measure that has been found in numerous studies
to be associated not only with lower risk for childhood leukemia but
also with lower risk for Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), gastrointestinal infection, ear infection, type 2 diabetes and obesity
later in life," said the study's lead author, Efrat Amitay, of the
School of Public Health at the University of Haifa in Israel.
"There is, therefore, a distinct public benefit in
breast-feeding and it should be encouraged and facilitated widely,"
Amitay added.
Although breast-feeding has been shown to have a
number of benefits for both mother and baby, the new study found only an
association between breast-feeding and a possibly lower risk of
childhood leukemia. Because of the study design, it could not prove that
breast-feeding caused the lower cancer risk.
Approximately 175,000 cases of childhood cancer
occur worldwide every year, according to background information in the
study, which was published June 1 online in JAMA Pediatrics. Leukemia,
a cancer of blood cells, accounts for about 30 percent of all childhood
cancers, making it the most common of childhood cancers, the study
noted.
To see if there was any connection between
breast-feeding and a lower risk of leukemia, the study authors reviewed
18 studies that included more than 10,000 children with leukemia, and
more than 17,500 healthy children.
The researchers also performed a separate analysis
of 15 studies to see if having been breast-fed led to a benefit over
never having been breast-fed. This second analysis didn't include three
of the studies from the original group because they didn't have data on
infants who had never been breast-fed.
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