L’breastfeeding helps prevent cognitive decline: to declare it is a new study conducted by researchers of theUCLA Health which revealed that the women over the age of 50 who breastfed their babies performed better on cognitive tests than women who never breastfed.
According to this research, breastfeeding can have a positive impact on the cognitive performance of postmenopausal women and could have long-term benefits for the mother’s brain.
The study was published in the scientific journal Evolution, Medicine and Public Health.
Why is breastfeeding neuroprotective? Here’s what the research says
“While many studies have found that breastfeeding improves a baby’s long-term health and well-being, our study is one of the few that have looked at the long-term health effects for women who have breastfed. their children“, he has declared Molly Fox, Ph.D., lead author of the study and Assistant Professor at the UCLA Department of Anthropology and the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences.
“Our results, which show superior cognitive performance among women over 50 who have breastfed, suggest that breastfeeding may be ‘neuroprotective’ later in life”, said the expert.
Cognitive health is critical to the well-being of aging adults. However, when cognition becomes impaired after age 50, it can be a strong predictor of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), the leading form of dementia and a cause of disability among the elderly, with women comprising nearly two-thirds of Americans living with the disease.
Several researches have also highlighted that Stages in a woman’s reproductive life history, such as menstruation, pregnancy, breastfeeding, and menopause may be linked to a higher or lower risk of developing various health conditions such as depression or cancer at the otherwise, but few studies have looked at breastfeeding and its impact on women’s long-term cognition.
Of those who did, there has been conflicting evidence that breastfeeding may be linked to improved cognitive performance or Alzheimer’s risk among postmenopausal 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 linked to a higher risk of AD “, he has declared Helen Lavretsky, MD, senior author of the study and professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at theSemel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA.
“As breastfeeding has been found to also help regulate stress, promote infant bonding, and reduce the risk of postpartum depression, suggesting acute neurocognitive benefits for the mother, we suspected it could also be associated with superior long-term cognitive performance for the mother as wellAdded Dr. Fox.
To find out, i researchers analyzed data collected from women who participated in two 12-week randomized, cross-sectional controlled clinical trials at UCLA Health: 1) The “Brain Connectivity and Response to Tai Chi in Geriatric Depression and Cognitive Decline“, Including depressed participants. 2) The “Reducing the risk of Alzheimer’s disease in high-risk women through yoga or exercise of memory that included non-depressed participants with some subjective memory disorders and a risk of heart disease.
Between the two studies, 115 women chose to participate, with 64 identified as depressed and 51 non-depressed. All participants completed a comprehensive battery of psychological tests that measure learning, delayed recall, executive functioning, and processing speed. They also answered a questionnaire about their reproductive life history that included questions about the age at which they began menstruation, the number of complete and incomplete pregnancies, the duration of breastfeeding for each child, and their menopausal age.
It is important to note that a none of the participants had been diagnosed with dementia or other psychiatric diagnoses such as bipolar disorder, alcohol or drug addiction, neurological disorders or other disabilities that prevented their participation or were taking psychoactive drugs. 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 the women’s reproductive history questionnaires revealed that about 65% of non-depressed women reported having breastfeeding, compared with 44% of depressed women. All non-depressed participants reported at least one completed pregnancy compared with 57.8% of depressed participants.
The cognitive test results also revealed that those who had breastfed, regardless of whether they were depressed or not, performed better on all four cognitive tests that measured learning, delayed recall, executive functioning, and processing compared to women who had not breastfed.
Separate analyzes of the data for the depressed and non-depressed groups also revealed that all four cognitive domain scores were significantly associated with breastfeeding in women who were not depressed. But in depressed women, 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 improved cognitive performance. When they added up all the time a woman spent breastfeeding in her life, they found that women who were not breastfeeding had significantly lower cognitive scores in three out of four domains than women who were breastfeeding for 1-12. months, and in all four domains compared to women who have breastfed for more than 12 months. Women who breastfeed the longest scored the highest on cognitive tests.
Future studies will be needed to explore the relationship between female breastfeeding history and cognitive performance in larger and geographically diverse groups of women. It is important to better understand the health implications of breastfeeding for women, given that today women breastfeed less frequently and for shorter periods of time than historically practiced “, concluded Fox.
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