Breastfeeding for longer duration enhances a child's intelligence, a research by Harvard University shows.
The researchers studied 1312 mothers and their babies. The results showed that each additional month a child was breastfed, he/she scored well in language skills at 3 years and intelligence at age 7, compared with babies not breastfed.
The research found that seven-year-old children who were breastfed for the first six months of their life had an almost five point lead over bottle-fed children.
"Our results support a causal relationship of breastfeeding in infancy with receptive language at age three and with verbal and non-verbal IQ at school age. These findings support national and international recommendations to promote exclusive breastfeeding through age six months and continuation of breastfeeding through at least age one year," Dr Mandy Belfort, assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and lead study author, wrote.
The participant children were told to give tests such as Peabody Picture Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test at age three and the Kaufman Brief Intelligence Test at age seven.
The researchers said that factors such as home environment and the IQ of mothers might have influenced the results. They also found that a few nutrients in breast milk that improves brain development. One of these nutrients is known as docosahexaenoic (DHA) that is commonly found in fish. The researchers also studied whether the mothers' fish consumption showed any links with benefits of breastfeeding. But, they did not get the required results.
"The problem currently is not so much that most women do not initiate breastfeeding, it is that they do not sustain it. In the United States, about 70 per cent of women overall initiate breastfeeding, although only 50 per cent of African-American women do. However, by six months, only 35 per cent and 20 per cent, respectively, are still breastfeeding," another researcher, Dr Dimitri Christakis from Seattle Children's Hospital Research Institute, wrote in the study.
