Breast Feeding Reduces Risk of Asthma to Infants

It's not new to everyone that breast milk is best for babies and even for mothers. Breast feeding for infants are even highly recommended by health institutions across the word.  To even persuade more mothers to join the breast feeding movement, a group of Switzerland based scientists were able to confirm breast milk's role in prevent the development of respiratory diseases like asthma to genetically susceptible infants.

The study is presented at the international congress of European Respiratory Society. The said research studied 368 infants with genetic risk of acquiring asthma and their breast feeding status. The findings showed that infants who were breastfed for weeks had 27 percent decrease in the risk of developing asthma and other related respiratory complications based on their genotypes. While infants that were not breastfed were more prone to develop respiratory complications.

"As research in this field progresses, we are understanding more and more about the gene-environment interaction for the development of asthma (and) our study sheds light on how this interaction can be modified by breastfeeding,´ Dr. Olga Gorlanova, lead researcher from the University Children's Hospital Basel, and University of Basel in Switzerland explained in an UNI India news post.

According to the National Health Interview Survey of 2011 as published by CDC, Asthma is one of the leading disease acquired by children. About 7.1 million or roughly 9.5 percent of the entire US population in 2011, are children diagnosed with asthma. Because of the innate weak immune system of children especially 2 years old and below, asthma became one of the leading cause of child deaths in the US. The US Health Department is launched Asthma Self-Management Education in schools targetting the young demographic to reduce the adverse asthma related health effects. Health authorities also advised asthmatic patients especially kid to routinely visit the doctor for close monitoring of the disease.