Babies who are breastfed for even just a few months from birth tend to score higher on neurocognitive tests at age 10, a new study has revealed.
Researchers in the US gave cognitive tests to nine and ten-year-olds whose mothers reported they were breastfed, and compared their results to scores of children who were not.
The findings suggest that any amount of breastfeeding has a positive cognitive impact on children, although the longer the children were breastfed, the higher their score.
Dr Daniel Adan Lopez, first author of the study, said: Hopefully from a policy standpoint, this can help improve the motivation to breastfeed.
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It might be advisable to avoid caffeine all together when you’re expecting, according to a spate of recent studies - meaning that even moderate coffee intake or a simple bar of chocolate could soon be off the menu for mums-to-be.
Two new studies published in February and March this year highlight the potentially harmful impact of caffeine consumption in pregnancy. The first, conducted by the University of Rochester Medical Center, found that caffeine consumed during pregnancy can change important brain pathways that could lead to behavioural problems such as ADHD later in life.
The second study, by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and published in JAMA Open Network on 25 March 2021, found that women who drank as little as half a cup of coffee per day on average gave birth to smaller babies than pregnant women who did not consume caffeinated beverages.
Caffeine consumed during pregnancy can change important brain pathways that could lead to behavioral problems later in life, according to new research.
Researchers analyzed thousands of brain scans of nine and 10-year-olds, and revealed changes in the brain structure of children exposed to caffeine in utero.
“I suppose the outcome of this study will be a recommendation that any caffeine during pregnancy is probably not such a good idea.”
“These are sort of small effects and it’s not causing horrendous psychiatric conditions, but it is causing minimal but noticeable behavioral issues that should make us consider long term effects of caffeine intake during pregnancy,” says John Foxe, director of the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience, and principal investigator of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development or ABCD Study at the University of Rochester.
Drinking coffee during pregnancy linked to later behavioral issues
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Too much coffee during pregnancy could lead to kids with behavior problems later on.
That s the key takeaway from new research that examined 9,000 brain scans from 9- and 10-year-olds as part of the largest long-term study of brain development and child health.
Advertisement The goalposts are moved by caffeine, and there are subtle, but real changes in behavioral outcomes in most kids who were exposed to caffeine in utero, said study author John Foxe. He is director of the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience at the University of Rochester in Rochester, N.Y.