“While many studies have found that breastfeeding improves a child’s long-term health and well-being, our study is one of very few that has looked at the long-term health effects for women who had breastfed their babies,” said Molly Fox, PhD, lead author of the study and an Assistant Professor in the UCLA Department of Anthropology and the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences.
Cognitive health is critical for wellbeing in aging adults. When cognition becomes impaired after the age of 50, it can be a strong predictor of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD), the leading form of dementia and cause of disability among the elderly.
Many studies have shown that phases of a woman’s reproductive life history can be linked to a higher or lower risk for developing various health conditions but few studies have examined breastfeeding and its impact on women’s long-term cognition.
There has been conflicting evidence that whether breastfeeding might be linked to better cognitive performance or Alzheimer’s risk among postmenopausal women.
To find out this, researchers analyzed data collected from women participating in two cross-sectional randomized controlled 12-week clinical trials at UCLA Health.
Among the two trials, 115 women chose to participate, with 64 identified as depressed and 51 non-depressed. All participants completed a comprehensive battery of psychological tests measuring learning, delayed recall, executive functioning, and processing speed.
They also answered a questionnaire about their reproductive life-history that included questions about the age they began menstruating, the number of complete and incomplete pregnancies, the length of time they breastfed for each child, and their age of menopause.
Key findings from this analysis revealed that about 65% of non-depressed women reported having breastfed, compared to 44% of the depressed women. All non-depressed participants reported at least one completed pregnancy compared to 57.8% of the depressed participants.
Results from the cognitive tests also revealed that those who had breastfed, regardless of whether they were depressed or not, performed better in all four of the cognitive tests measuring for learning, delayed recall, executive functioning, and processing compared to women who had not breastfed.
Interestingly, researchers also found that longer time spent breastfeeding was associated with better cognitive performance.
Future studies will be needed to explore the relationship between women’s history of breastfeeding and cognitive performance in larger, more geographically diverse groups of women.
It is important to better understand the health implications of breastfeeding for women, given that women today breastfeed less frequently and for shorter periods than was practiced historically.
Source: Medindia
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