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Benefits of exclusive breastfeeding on children's later development in rural South Africa

Research

Professor Alan Stein, from the University of Oxford's Department of Psychiatry, contributes to a new study conducted at the Africa Centre for Population Health.

Photo of children in rural Africa © Creative Common - Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Photo of children in rural Africa

photo credit: happy children via photopin (license)

In this study, published in PLOS Medicine, an international team led by a team of investigators, including Professor Alan Stein of the Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, assessed over 1,500 children in rural South Africa, 900 of whom had been involved in an early infant feeding study.

They found longer durations of exclusive breastfeeding was associated with fewer behaviour problems at ages 7 to 11 years. Children exclusively breastfed for the recommended six months, compared with those exclusively breastfed for less than one month, were approximately half (56 percent) as likely to have behavioural problems at primary school age.

Read more (Department of Psychiatry website)