Abstract
BackgroundBreastfeeding has important positive long-term health consequences for infants and mothers. The World Health Organization recommends that all infants should be exclusively breastfed for six months or longer, and advises continuation of breastfeeding for two years or beyond. However, these recommendations are not met in many countries. This study examined whether a comprehensive, evidence-based breastfeeding intervention, the Breastfeeding Support Programme (BSP), promotes prolonged duration and exclusivity of breastfeeding among its participants.MethodsA quasi-experimental design was used to compare breastfeeding duration and exclusivity in the BSP group (N = 66) to breastfeeding duration and exclusivity in a control group (N = 72). Participants who followed the BSP were provided with 6 consults delivered by a lactation consultant. The consults started during pregnancy and continued up until 10 weeks after delivery. Participants in the control group did not follow the BSP. Pretest and posttest questionnaires were administered through the internet. A Cox proportional hazards regression analysis was used to estimate adjusted hazard ratios (HR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) for cessation of any and exclusive breastfeeding, while controlling for differences at baseline.ResultsThe effect of the BSP on survival rates for any and exclusive breastfeeding were significant while controlling for differences between the two groups at baseline (respectively HR = 0.34, p < .001 [95% CI = 0.18–0.61] and HR = 0.46, p < .001 [95% CI = 0.29–0.72]). Among mothers in the BSP group there was on average 66% less risk of cessation of any breastfeeding and on average 54% less risk of cessation of exclusive breastfeeding at any point in time compared to those in the control group.ConclusionsThe BSP appears to be an effective means to delay cessation of any and exclusive breastfeeding cessation and therefore to increase breastfeeding duration and exclusivity. This is an important finding, because earlier cessation of breastfeeding than desired is a common problem in many countries. Future research into the effectiveness of the BSP could consider random assignment to conditions and test the effectiveness of the intervention in other populations to investigate further whether wide-scale implementation of this intervention could be useful to promote breastfeeding.
Highlights
Breastfeeding has important positive long-term health consequences for infants and mothers
The research question we will answer in this study is: do the mothers enrolled in the Breastfeeding Support Programme (BSP) engage in prolonged breastfeeding in terms of duration and exclusivity compared to mothers in a control group? Based on the accumulated research into the effectiveness of breastfeeding promotion interventions [20,21,22,23,24,25,26], and on studies showing the successful application of the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) to breastfeeding
We obtained a final sample of 138 women (66 mothers in the BSP group and 72 mothers in the control group), due to non-response at the pretest (N = 28 in the BSP group, N = 40 in the control group) or posttest (N = 12 in the BSP group, N = 18 in the control group), missing data on breastfeeding duration (N = 5 in the BSP group, N = 2 in the control group) or multiple births (N = 1 in the BSP group, N = 1 in the control group)
Summary
Breastfeeding has important positive long-term health consequences for infants and mothers. The World Health Organization recommends that all infants should be exclusively breastfed for six months or longer, and advises continuation of breastfeeding for two years or beyond. These recommendations are not met in many countries. An increasing body of research shows that breastfeeding has important positive long-term health consequences for infants and mothers. Infants should receive complementary foods from 6 months, while breastfeeding should be continued for up to 2 years or beyond [7] Some women cannot breastfeed for physical or medical reasons [10], many women could benefit from breastfeeding support
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