A new study by U.S. scientists has revealed that breastfed children are more likely to do better at high school, compared to their counterparts who were raised on a bottle. The experts also say that breastfeeding is associated with an increase in the odds of attending college.

Professor Joseph Sabia from the American University and Professor Daniel Rees from the University of Colorado, Denver, based their findings on the analysis of the breast feeding histories and high school grades of 126 children from 59 U.S. families. In the study, the investigators compared siblings who were breastfed as babies to other children who were not. Information on high school completion and college attendance data was gathered from 191 siblings belonging to 90 families.

By comparing siblings, the experts were able to account for the influence of a number of difficult-to-measure factors such as maternal intelligence and the quality of the home environment. The investigators used data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health.

The results revealed that every additional month of breastfeeding was associated with an increase in high school GPA (grade point averages) of 0.019 points and an increase in the probability of attending a college of 0.014 points. According to the study, more than 50 per cent of the estimated impact on high school grades of being breast fed, and approximately 20 per cent of the estimated effect on college attendance, can be associated with improvements in mental ability and overall health.

"The results of our study suggest that the cognitive and health benefits of breastfeeding may lead to important educational benefits for children in the long run," Dr. Sabia, a professor of public policy in American University's School of Public Affairs , whose research mainly concentrates on health economics, said in a statement. However, this is just a beginning. Much more on the matter still needs to be done in order to determine a definitive causal link, the author added.

By examining the differences between children, we can completely exclude the possibility that family-level factors such as socioeconomic status, for example, are driving the relationship between having been breastfed and school grades, said Rees, an economics professor. Prof. Sabia said that their study appears to be the first to use sibling data to study the effect of breastfeeding on high school performance, completion and college attendance.

The findings are published in the June 11 issue of the Journal of Human Capital.

Tags: Breastfeeding, Education

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