A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Human Milk Feeding and Short-Term Growth in Preterm and Very Low Birth Weight Infants.

Machiko Suganuma,Jacqueline Miller,Yan Fong Chong,Carmel T Collins,Alice R Rumbold

doi:10.3390/nu13062089

Abstract

Human milk (HM) is the gold standard for feeding infants but has been associated with slower growth in preterm infants compared with preterm formula. This systematic review and meta-analysis summarises the post-1990 literature to examine the effect of HM feeding on growth during the neonatal admission of preterm infants with birth weight ≤1500 g and/or born ≤28 weeks’ gestation. Medline, PubMed, CINAHL, and Scopus were searched, and comparisons were grouped as exclusive human milk (EHM) vs. exclusive preterm formula (EPTF), any HM vs. EPTF, and higher vs. lower doses of HM. We selected studies that used fortified HM and compared that with a PTF; studies comparing unfortified HM and term formula were excluded. Experimental and observational studies were pooled separately. The GRADE system was used to evaluate risk of bias and certainty of evidence. Forty-four studies were included with 37 (n = 9963 infants) included in the meta-analyses. In general, due to poor quality studies, evidence of the effect of any HM feeds or higher versus lower doses of HM was inconclusive. There was a possible effect that lower doses of HM compared with higher doses of HM improved weight gain during the hospital admission, and separately, a possible effect of increased head circumference growth in infants fed EPTF vs. any HM. The clinical significance of this is unclear. There was insufficient evidence to determine the effects of an exclusive HM diet on any outcomes.

Highlights

Mother’s own milk (MOM) is the feed of choice for preterm infants [1] because of clear advantages for immunological, gastrointestinal, and neurodevelopmental health and function [2,3]
Forty-four papers were identified for this review and included nine randomised controlled trial (RCT) [15,19,20,21,31,32,33,34,35], one non-randomised intervention trial [36], three secondary analyses of RCTs [9,37,38], six interrupted time series studies [8,28,39,40,41,42], and 25 cohort studies [7,22,29,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56,57,58,59,60,61,62,63,64]
In five RCTs, we compared data to a non-randomised reference group, and these were assessed for study quality and treated as non-randomised trials [15,19,20,21,35]

Summary

Introduction

Mother’s own milk (MOM) is the feed of choice for preterm infants [1] because of clear advantages for immunological, gastrointestinal, and neurodevelopmental health and function [2,3]. Where there is insufficient MOM, current recommendations are to use appropriately screened and pasteurised donor human milk (DHM) if available, and preterm formula (PTF) [2,4]. Human milk (HM) alone is insufficient to support the growth requirements of preterm and very low birth weight (

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