Human Milk Banking: a bridge between the preterm mother and infant; the experience from a Greek Public Perinatal Center

Abstract

Abstract: Worldwide g rowing clinical evidence has placed raw human milk feeding and the supply of donor milk as well as the early initiation of breastfeeding as a basic nutritional policy for preterm infants in Greece. Nowadays, donor human milk banking is promoted, protected, and supported as an extension of the Greek national breastfeeding policy. In fact, human milk banking besides collecting, processing, and storing donor milk consists a bridge between the preterm mother and infant, especially during the first days of lactation, that preterm mother’s milk cannot completely fulfill her infants’ needs. Human milk banking represents a tool for breastfeed­ing promotion. Preterm infants fed with an absolute human milk diet are able to initiate breastfeeding earlier compared to those who are fed mainly with a preterm formula, who achieve later on time to initiate bottle-feeding. The policy of early aggressive nutrition even from the first hour of life with the minimal enteric feeding, is now practiced, by most neonatologists, in our country too, while early nutrition is also considered to be safe in terms of lifelong biological effects. For all the infants, both terms and preterms, human milk imposes potential beneficial effects on immunity and the maternal-infant emotional bond. However, the nutritional role of human milk in premature infants is less well defined as it contains insufficient amounts of some nutrients. Multi-component bovine fortifiers provide extra nutrients to supplement human milk (protein, energy, calcium, phosphate, and carbohydrate, as well as vitamins and trace minerals), while t argeted fortification of human milk is associated with short-term improvements at hospital discharge, in weight gain, linear and head growth, feeding tolerance and length of stay in NICU.