These tools will no longer be maintained as of December 31, 2024. Archived website can be found here. PubMed4Hh GitHub repository can be found here. Contact NLM Customer Service if you have questions.


Pubmed for Handhelds

PUBMED FOR HANDHELDS

Search MEDLINE/PubMed

  • Title: Breast-feeding and infant growth in the first six months.
    Author: Mo-Suwan L, Junjana C.
    Journal: J Med Assoc Thai; 1991 Sep; 74(9):386-90. PubMed ID: 1791392.
    Abstract:
    Weight and length of 67 breast-fed infants were followed every two weeks from birth to 6 months. All infants were healthy and developed normally. Weight curves were found to be parallel to the NCHS and Bangkok curves up to 4 months then bending slightly but not statistically significant. This supports "the breast-fed infants having a different growth pattern from the mixed (breast-formula) fed" finding observed in studies from developed countries. In comparison to the NCHS and Bangkok length data, rural male infants were significantly (p less than 0.01 and 0.05 respectively) shorter from birth onwards, whereas, median lengths of the rural female infants were significantly shorter (p less than 0.01 and 0.05 respectively) after 4 months. Genetic influence on linear growth was thought to be the cause. The cautious use of the current growth curves on breast-fed infants was emphasized. Health professionals followed 67 healthy, full-term, and breast-fed infants every 2 weeks from birth to 6 months old to observe their growth patterns. The group I urban infants lived near Songklanagarind Hospital in the Hat Yai area of Songkhla, Thailand. Group II infants lived in a coastal village 75 km from the hospital. Mothers exclusively breast fed only 5 infants from each group (total of 10 infants) for 4 months. By 6 months, however, only 5 infants overall received only breast milk. The weight curves matched the US National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) and Bangkok curves for the 1st 3 months then deviated from those standards for the 2nd 3 months. The difference was not statistically significant, however. The lengths of urban boys were not much different from those of the reference population and their trends matched those of the weight curves. On the other hand, the median lengths of the rural boys were much shorter than the NCHS and Bangkok 50th percentiles (p.01 and p.05, respectively). Urban boys were always much longer than rural boys (p.01). For the 1st 3 months of life, the girls' length curves for both groups emulated those of the NCHS and Bangkok. Yet the median length of urban girls was considerable shorter than that of NCHS and Bangkok at 6 months (p.01) while that of rural girls deviated from the NCHS 50th percentile at 4 months (p.01) and from Bangkok's 50th percentile at 5-6 months (p.05). Still all the infants remained physically and developmentally health. Since the weight for age remained good throughout the study, the slow linear growth could not have been due to malnutrition. They concluded that the linear growth differences were due to genetic influences.
    [Abstract] [Full Text] [Related] [New Search]