Breastfeeding May Help Prevent Cognitive Decline

Summary: While the positive impact of breastfeeding on babies is well known, little is known about the positive benefits for the mother. A new study reveals women who breastfed their children performed better on cognitive tests at age 50 than those who fed their children with an alternative method.

Source: UCLA

A new study led by researchers at UCLA Health has found that women over the age of 50 who had breastfed their babies performed better on cognitive tests compared to women who had never breastfed.

The findings, published in Evolution, Medicine and Public Health, suggest that breastfeeding may have a positive impact on postmenopausal women’s cognitive performance and could have long-term benefits for the mother’s brain.

“While many studies have found that breastfeeding improves a child’s long-term health and well-being, our study is one of very few that has looked at the long-term health effects for women who had breastfed their babies,” said Molly Fox, PhD, lead author of the study and an Assistant Professor in the UCLA Department of Anthropology and the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences.

“Our findings, which show superior cognitive performance among women over 50 who had breastfed, suggest that breastfeeding may be ‘neuroprotective’ later in life.”

Cognitive health is critical for wellbeing in aging adults. Yet, when cognition becomes impaired after the age of 50, it can be a strong predictor of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD), the leading form of dementia and cause of disability among the elderly – with women comprising nearly two-thirds of Americans living with the disease.

Many studies also show that phases of a woman’s reproductive life-history, such as menstruation, pregnancy, breastfeeding and menopause can be linked to a higher or lower risk for developing various health conditions like depression or breast cancer, yet few studies have examined breastfeeding and its impact on women’s long-term cognition. Of those that have, there has been conflicting evidence as to whether breastfeeding might be linked to better cognitive performance or Alzheimer’s risk among post-menopausal women.

“What we do know is that there is a positive correlation between breastfeeding and a lower risk of other diseases such as type-2 diabetes and heart disease, and that these conditions are strongly connected to a higher risk for AD,” said Helen Lavretsky, MD, the senior author of the study and a professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA. 

“Because breastfeeding has also been found to help regulate stress, promote infant bonding and lower the risk of post-partum depression, which suggest acute neurocognitive benefits for the mother, we suspected that it could also be associated with long-term superior cognitive performance for the mother as well,” added Dr. Fox.

To find out, the researchers analyzed data collected from women participating in two cross-sectional randomized controlled 12-week clinical trials at UCLA Health: 1) The “Brain Connectivity and Response to Tai Chi in Geriatric Depression and Cognitive Decline,” included depressed participants. 2) The “Reducing Risk for Alzheimer’s Disease in High-Risk Women through Yoga or Memory Training that included non-depressed participants with some subjective memory complaints and a risk for heart disease.

Among the two trials, 115 women chose to participate, with 64 identified as depressed and 51 non-depressed.  All participants completed a comprehensive battery of psychological tests measuring learning, delayed recall, executive functioning and processing speed. They also answered a questionnaire about their reproductive life-history that included questions about the age they began menstruating, number of complete and incomplete pregnancies, the length of time they breastfed for each child and their age of menopause.

Importantly, none of the participants had been diagnosed with dementia, or other psychiatric diagnoses such as bipolar disorder, alcohol or drug dependence, neurological disorders or had other disabilities preventing their participation or taking any psychoactive medications. There was also no significant difference in age, race, education or other cognitive measures between the depressed and non-depressed participants.

Key findings from the researchers’ analysis of the data collected from questionnaires on the women’s reproductive history revealed that about 65% of non-depressed women reported having breastfed, compared to 44% of the depressed women. All non-depressed participants reported at least one completed pregnancy compared to 57.8% of the depressed participants.

This shows a woman breastfeeding a newborn
Women who had breastfed their babies performed better on cognitive tests after the age of 50 compared to women who had not breastfed. Image is in the public domain

Results from the cognitive tests also revealed that those who had breastfed, regardless of whether they were depressed or not, performed better in all four of the cognitive tests measuring for learning, delayed recall, executive functioning and processing compared to women who had not breastfed.

Separate analyses of the data for the depressed and non-depressed groups also revealed that all four cognitive domain scores were significantly associated with breastfeeding in the women who were not depressed.  But in the women who were depressed, only two of the cognitive domains – executive functioning and processing speed – were significantly associated with breastfeeding. 

Interestingly, the researchers also found that longer time spent breastfeeding was associated with better cognitive performance. When they added up all the time a woman spent breastfeeding in her life, they found that women who did not breastfeed had significantly lower cognitive scores in three out of four domains compared to women who had breastfed for 1-12 months, and in all four domains compared to the women who had breastfed for more than 12 months. Women who had breastfed the longest had the highest cognitive test scores.

“Future studies will be needed to explore the relationship between women’s history of breastfeeding and cognitive performance in larger, more geographically diverse groups of women. It is important to better understand the health implications of breastfeeding for women, given that women today breastfeed less frequently and for shorter time periods than was practiced historically,” said Dr. Fox.

About this breastfeeding and cognition research news

Author: Kelli Stauning
Source: UCLA
Contact: Kelli Stauning – UCLA
Image: The image is in the public domain

Original Research: Open access.
Women who breastfeed exhibit cognitive benefits after age 50” by Molly Fox et al. Evolution, Medicine and Public Health


Abstract

Women who breastfeed exhibit cognitive benefits after age 50

Background and objectives

Women who breastfeed may experience long-term benefits for their health in addition to the more widely-appreciated effects on the breastfed child. Breastfeeding may induce long-term effects on biopsychosocial systems implicated in brain health. Also, due to diminished breastfeeding in the post-industrial era, it is important to understand the lifespan implications of breastfeeding for surmising maternal phenotypes in our species’ collective past. Here, we assess how women’s breastfeeding history relates to post-menopausal cognitive performance.

Methodology

A convenience sample of Southern California women age 50+ was recruited via two clinical trials, completed a comprehensive neuropsychological test battery and answered a questionnaire about reproductive life-history. General linear models examined whether cognitive domain scores were associated with breastfeeding in depressed and non-depressed women, controlling for age, education, and ethnicity.

Results

Women who breastfed exhibited superior performance in the domains of Learning, Delayed Recall, Executive Functioning and Processing Speed compared to women who did not breastfeed (p-values 0.0003-0.015). These four domains remained significant in analyses limited to non-depressed and parous subsets of the cohort. Among those depressed, only Executive Functioning and Processing Speed were positively associated with breastfeeding.

Conclusions and implications

We add to the growing list of lifespan health correlates of breastfeeding for women’s health, such as lower risk of type-2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and breast cancer. We surmise that women’s post-menopausal cognitive competence may have been greater in past environments in which breastfeeding was more prevalent, bolstering the possibility that post-menopausal longevity may have been adaptive across human evolutionary history.

Lay Summary

Breastfeeding may affect women’s cognitive performance. Breastfeeding’s biological effects and psychosocial effects, such as improved stress regulation, could exert long-term benefits for the mother’s brain. We found that women who breastfed performed better on a series of cognitive tests in later life compared to women who did not breastfeed.

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