Women who breastfeed exhibit cognitive benefits after age 50
| Autor: | Michaela M. Milillo, Helen Lavretsky, Linda M. Ercoli, Prabha Siddarth, Hanadi Ajam Oughli, Yesenia Aguilar, Molly Fox, Sarah A. Nguyen |
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| Rok vydání: | 2021 |
| Předmět: |
Biopsychosocial model
Gerontology reproductive life-history breastfeeding business.industry Health Toxicology and Mutagenesis AcademicSubjects/SCI01130 Breastfeeding Medicine (miscellaneous) Cognition lactation Affect (psychology) cognitive health Cognitive test Alzheimer’s risk factors Cohort Medicine AcademicSubjects/MED00860 Original Research Article business Breast feeding Psychosocial Ecology Evolution Behavior and Systematics dementia |
| Zdroj: | Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health |
| ISSN: | 2050-6201 |
| DOI: | 10.1093/emph/eoab027 |
| Popis: | Background and objectivesWomen who breastfeed may experience long-term benefits for their health in addition to the more widely appreciated effects on the breastfed child. Breastfeeding may induce long-term effects on biopsychosocial systems implicated in brain health. Also, due to diminished breastfeeding in the postindustrial era, it is important to understand the lifespan implications of breastfeeding for surmising maternal phenotypes in our species’ collective past. Here, we assess how women’s breastfeeding history relates to postmenopausal cognitive performance.MethodologyA convenience sample of Southern California women age 50+ was recruited via two clinical trials, completed a comprehensive neuropsychological test battery and answered a questionnaire about reproductive life history. General linear models examined whether cognitive domain scores were associated with breastfeeding in depressed and non-depressed women, controlling for age, education and ethnicity.ResultsWomen who breastfed exhibited superior performance in the domains of Learning, Delayed Recall, Executive Functioning and Processing Speed compared to women who did not breastfeed (P-values 0.0003–0.015). These four domains remained significant in analyses limited to non-depressed and parous subsets of the cohort. Among those depressed, only Executive Functioning and Processing Speed were positively associated with breastfeeding.Conclusions and implicationsWe add to the growing list of lifespan health correlates of breastfeeding for women’s health, such as the lower risk of type-2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and breast cancer. We surmise that women’s postmenopausal cognitive competence may have been greater in past environments in which breastfeeding was more prevalent, bolstering the possibility that postmenopausal longevity may have been adaptive across human evolutionary history.Lay SummaryBreastfeeding may affect women’s cognitive performance. Breastfeeding’s biological effects and psychosocial effects, such as improved stress regulation, could exert long-term benefits for the mother’s brain. We found that women who breastfed performed better on a series of cognitive tests in later life compared to women who did not breastfeed. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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