CDC: Most Moms Stop Breastfeeding Earlier Than They Predict

Tuesday, June 5th, 2012

Most mothers who say they plan to breastfeed do so for a shorter period of time than they anticipate, according to a new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  MSNBC has more:

Roughly half of the women in the new study said before they delivered they planned to breast-feed exclusively for at least three months, the CDC researchers report Monday in Pediatrics. But only a third of those women actually achieved their goal.

“The one that shocks me is the fact that 42 percent stopped in the first month,” lead author Cria Perrine, an epidemiologist in the CDC’s Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity and Obesity, tells msnbc.com. And about a third of those women had abandoned plans to exclusively breast-feed by the time they took their baby home from the hospital.

“To me, this isn’t about the individual women,” Perrine says. “This to me says we as a society are not supporting mothers to feed their infants the way they want to.”

Image: Breastfeeding mom, via Shutterstock.

Study: Mom’s Caffeine Intake Does Not Cause Colic

Friday, April 6th, 2012

A new study published in the journal Pediatrics has found that women who consume high quantities of caffeine during pregnancy and early in their children’s infancy do not put their babies at higher risk of suffering from colic or sleep disturbance.

The study followed mothers of babies born in Pelotas, Brazil in 2004.  NPR reports on the findings:

“When we planned the study, we worked with the hypothesis of association between heavy maternal consumption of caffeine and higher infant awakenings at night,” Marlos Rodrigues Domingues, a researcher at Brazil’s Universidade Federal de Pelotas and co-author of the study, tells Shots in an email.

It’s not clear why the infants’ sleep wasn’t affected. The babies might have developed a tolerance to caffeine while in the womb, Rodrigues says. But other studies have found no caffeine metabolites in the urine of babies whose mothers drink coffee, suggesting that the babies don’t absorb caffeine the way older children and adults do.

Image: Cup of coffee, via Shutterstock.