How Breast Milk Boosts Preemies

Babies born prematurely face a myriad of health challenges — but it appears feeding them mostly breast milk during their first month of life spurs more robust brain growth than if they’re given little or no breast milk.

“As the amount of breast milk increased, so did a baby’s chances of having a larger cortical surface area,” said Cynthia Rogers, M.D. She’s a senior investigator and assistant professor of child psychiatry at St. Louis Children’s Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri.

“The cortex is the part of the brain associated with cognition, so we assume that more cortex will help improve cognition as the babies grow and develop,” Rogers added.

Preterm birth is a leading cause of neurological problems in children and has been linked to psychiatric disorders later in childhood. Rogers and her team made the findings while studying preterm infants in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at St. Louis Children’s Hospital.

All of the babies were born at least 10 weeks early, with an average gestation of 26 weeks — or about 14 weeks premature. Preemies typically have smaller brains than full-term infants because they are still growing and developing.

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The researchers retrospectively looked to see how much breast milk those babies had received while being cared for in the NICU. Then, the researchers conducted brain scans on those infants at about the time each would have been born had the babies not arrived early.

They found that preemies whose daily diets were at least 50 percent breast milk had more brain tissue and cortical surface area by their due dates than premature babies who consumed significantly less breast milk. It also didn’t seem to matter if the milk came from the babies’ own mothers or if the breast milk had been donated by other women. The study simply focused on the influence of breast milk in general.

The 77 preterm infants involved in the study will be followed through their first several years of life to see how they grow; the focus will be on their motor, cognitive and social development. As the babies get older, the researchers believe they will be able to determine the effects of early exposure to breast milk on later developmental outcomes.

“We want to see whether this difference in brain size has an effect on any of those developmental milestones,” Rogers said. “Neonatologists already believe breast milk is the best nutrition for preterm infants. We wanted to see whether it was possible to detect the impact of breast milk on the brain this early in life and whether the benefits appeared quickly or developed over time.”

The team plans to further investigate what is present in the milk that seems to promote brain development, said Rogers. She added that because all of the babies in the study were born early, it isn’t clear whether breast milk would provide similar benefits for babies born at full term.