Children who were breastfed for more than six months scored the highest on cognitive, language and motor development tests as toddlers, in a new study from Greece.
Earlier research tied breastfeeding to better thinking and memory skills. But how it's related to language skills and movement and coordination had been less clear.
The new study doesn't prove breastfeeding is responsible for better development, but it shows a strong association, researchers said.
Most evidence "pretty clearly shows there are significant medical benefits of breast-feeding," Dr. Dimitri Christakis told Reuters Health in an email.
Christakis is a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington and director of the Center for Child Health, Behavior and Development at Seattle Children's Research Institute. He was not involved in the new study.
"I think that the evidence is now of sufficient quality that we can close the book on these benefits and focus instead on how do we succeed in promoting breast-feeding because all of the studies, including this one, that have looked at it have found a linear relationship, which is to say that the benefits accrue with each additional month that a child is breastfed," he said.
For their report, Dr. Leda Chatzi from the University of Crete and her colleagues used data from a long-term study of 540 mothers and their kids. http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/news/fullstory_143742.html
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