A new meta-analysis has found that women who breastfed their babies were less likely to have heart disease or stroke, or die from cardiovascular disease, compared to those who did not breastfeed their babies. The study has just been published in the Journal of the American Heart Association (JAHA), an open access peer-reviewed journal of the American Heart Association.
The report is included in a special edition of pregnancy, along with other research articles that analyze other cardiovascular aspects during pregnancy for the pregnant woman and the baby. It is not the first time that breastfeeding has been associated with health benefits for women who practice it, and studies had already been published that linked it to a lower risk of stroke, heart problems, or even multiple sclerosis in the case of mothers. It has also been linked to a lower risk of type 2 diabetes, ovarian cancer, and breast cancer.
This type of feeding also provides numerous benefits for the baby, since those who have been breastfed are also less likely to suffer from respiratory infections or die from infectious diseases, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
Women who breastfed had a 14% lower risk of coronary heart disease, a 12% lower risk of stroke and a 17% lower risk of dying from cardiovascular disease.
“Previous studies have investigated the association between breastfeeding and the risk of cardiovascular disease in the mother; however, the findings were inconsistent regarding the strength of the association and, specifically, the relationship between different durations of breastfeeding and cardiovascular disease risk. Therefore, it was important to systematically review the available literature and mathematically combine all the evidence on this topic”, explained Dr. Peter Willeit, professor of clinical epidemiology at the Medical University of Innsbruck (Austria) and lead author.
Relationship between breastfeeding and maternal cardiovascular risk
The paper’s authors analyzed health data from eight studies conducted between 1986 and 2009 in Australia, China, Norway, Japan and the United States and one multinational study. They reviewed health records for nearly 1.2 million women (average age 25 at first birth), looking at the relationship between breastfeeding and individual mothers’ cardiovascular risk.
“We collected information, for example, about how long women had breastfed during their lifetime, the number of births, the age at first birth, and whether or not the women had a heart attack or stroke later in life,” he said. the first author Dr. Lena Tschiderer, a postdoctoral researcher at the Medical University of Innsbruck.
The main conclusions reached by the researchers are:
“It is important that women are aware of the benefits of breastfeeding for the health of their babies and also for their own personal health,” Willeit recalled. “Furthermore, these findings from high-quality studies conducted around the world highlight the need to encourage and support breastfeeding, such as breastfeeding-friendly work environments and breastfeeding education and programs for families before and after childbirth. ”.
The researchers did not have enough information on women who breastfed for more than two years, which is considered a limitation of the meta-analysis, since, as Tschiderer has stated: “If we had these additional data, we would have been able to calculate better estimates of the association between the duration of breastfeeding and the development of cardiovascular diseases in mothers”.
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