Breastfeeding and IQ
Infants who are breastfeed tend to have higher IQ as they mature. This paper examines that phenomenon, which presents a complex set of cause-and-effect questions, including how long infants must be breastfed to receive any benefits associated with nursefeeding, whether there are important intercultural variations among children whose IQs are higher (for example, if there is a greater correlation in societies where most women breastfeed or, alternatively, where few breastfeed) and whether the rise in IQ results from the chemistry of breastmilk, the practice of breastfeeding itself, or from the fact that women who breastfeed are significantly different (on an a priori basis) from those who do not.
Introduction
For a number of years the scientific and medical communities have argued that breastfeeding provides a substantial benefit to infants, including primarily the fact that it promotes emotionally security and increases a child's overall health by transferring the mother's accumulated immunity to the infant. There have also been a number of reports that link breastfeeding to health benefits for the mother, primarily in terms of quicker weight loss after pregnancy. However, recent research suggests that there may be another important reason to breastfeed, which is that infants who are breastfed have a higher IQ when they are older. This paper examines this issue.
While it is tempting to assume that it is breastfeeding itself that produces the rise in IQ, the issue presents us with an almost classic case of the ways in which causation and correlation can become confused in terms of understanding how even a relatively straightforward phenomenon (http://www.fnri.dost.gov.ph/htm/philng.htm).There are a number of questions that must be answered to understand this phenomenon:
1) Is breastfeeding correlated with increased IQ?
This does seem to be supported by research, such as the following results that followed a group of children from birth to 18 years and focused on the relationship between duration of breastfeeding as infants and later broad-based measures of intelligence (Lucas, 1992, p. 261).
Increasing duration of breastfeeding was associated with consistent and statistically significant increases in 1) intelligence quotient assessed at ages 8 and 9 years; 2) reading comprehension, mathematical ability, and scholastic ability assessed during the period from 10 to 13 years; 3) teacher ratings of reading and mathematics assessed at 8 and 12 years; and 4) higher levels of attainment in school leaving examinations. Children who were breastfed for >= 8 months had mean test scores that were between 0.35 and 0.59 SD units higher than children who were bottle-fed (http://www.breastfeeding.com/all_about/all_about_iq.html#FIRST).
2. If we can then assume that it is true that breastfeeding is correlated with increased IQ, does it cause that increase?
This is not a simple question for while breastfeeding is something that is natural in the sense that nearly every human (as well as every other mammal) can nurse infants, within the context of human society it is far more a question of culture than of nature (Bauer, 1991). The profile of women who breastfeed is different from those who do not, and this suggests that those infants who are breastfed have both a different genetic inheritance as well as a different micro-cultural environment that they grow up in (http://www.vhihealthe.com/news/n041002c.html).Nevertheless, an assessment of intelligence across cultures suggests that there are real links between intelligence and breastfeeding:
Katherine Dettwyler, Ph.D., member of the anthropology department at Texas A & M. University, has researched the role of breastfeeding rituals and their results in primitive cultures as well as in today's society. "I have carefully read most of these studies, and find them to be carefully constructed and carried out," she says. "The ones that include duration of breastfeeding show that the longer the child is breastfed, up to study limits of 24 months, the greater their IQ scores and school performance. The human child's brain is growing most rapidly during the first two years of life. Since we know that some of the ingredients in breastmilk are critical to brain growth and development, the results are not surprising" (http://breastfeed.com/resources/articles/breastfeediq.htm).
It is impossible definitively to sort out differences in IQ in those who are...
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