母乳喂养 益智儿童！
(2008-05-12 21:58:40)
加拿大研究人员发现，母乳喂养有助于提高儿童智商和读写能力。研究人员对将近1.4万名儿童进行6年多随访研究，发现母乳喂养的儿童与非母乳喂养者相比，前者平均综合智商比后者高5.9分，读写能力也高于后者。
A
new study provides some of the best evidence to date that
breast-feeding can make children smarter, an international team of
researchers said on Monday.
Children
whose mothers breast-fed them longer and did not mix in baby
formula scored higher on intelligence tests, the researchers in
Canada and Belarus reported.
About half
the 14,000 babies were randomly assigned to a group in which
prolonged and exclusive breast-feeding by the mother was encouraged
at Belarussian hospitals and clinics. The mothers of the other
babies received no special encouragement.
Those in the
breast-feeding encouragement group were, on average, breast-fed
longer than the others and were less likely to have been given
formula in a bottle.
At 3 months,
73 percent of the babies in the breast-feeding encouragement group
were breast-fed, compared to 60 percent of the other group. At 6
months, it was 50 percent versus 36 percent.
In addition, the group given
encouragement was far more likely to give their children only
breast milk. The rate was seven times higher, for example, at 3
months.
The children
were monitored for about six and a half years.
The children
in the group where breast-feeding was encouraged scored about 5
percent higher in IQ tests and did better academically, the
researchers found.
Previous
studies had indicated brain development and intelligence benefits
for breast-fed children.
But
researchers have sought to determine whether it was the
breast-feeding that did it, or that mothers who prefer to
breast-feed their babies may differ from those who do not.
The design
of the study - randomly assigning babies to two groups regardless
of the mothers' characteristics - was intended to eliminate the
confusion.
"Mothers who
breast-feed or those who breast-feed longer or most exclusively are
different from the mothers who don't," Michael Kramer of McGill
University in Montreal and the Montreal Children's Hospital
said.
"They tend
to be smarter. They tend to be more invested in their babies. They
tend to interact with them more closely. They may be the kind of
mothers who read to their kids more, who spend more time with their
kids, who play with them more," added Kramer, who led the study
published in the journal Archives of General Psychiatry.
The
researchers measured the differences between the two groups using
IQ tests administered by the children's pediatricians and by
ratings by their teachers of their school performance in reading,
writing, math and other subjects.
Both sets of
scores were significantly higher in the children from the
breast-feeding promotion group.
The study
was launched in the mid-1990s. Kramer said the initial idea was to
do it in the United States and Canada, but many hospitals in those
countries by that time had begun strongly encouraging
breast-feeding as a matter of routine.
The
situation was different in Belarus at the time, he said, with less
routine encouragement for the practice.
Kramer said
how breast-feeding may make children more intelligent is
unclear.
"It could
even be that because breast-feeding takes longer, the mother is
interacting more with the baby, talking with the baby, soothing the
baby," he said. "It could be an emotional thing. It could be a
physical thing. Or it could be a hormone or something else in the
milk that's absorbed by the baby".
Previous
studies have shown babies whose mothers breast-fed them enjoy many
health advantages over formula-fed babies.
These
include fewer ear, stomach or intestinal infections, digestive
problems, skin diseases and allergies, and less risk of developing
high blood pressure, diabetes and obesity.
The American
Academy of Pediatrics recommends that women who do not have health
problems exclusively breast-feed their infants for at least the
first six months, continuing at least through the first year as
other foods are introduced.
Vocabulary:
breast-feeding：母乳喂养
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