Fox Molly, Siddarth Prabha, Oughli Hanadi Ajam, Nguyen Sarah A, Milillo Michaela M, Aguilar Yesenia, Ercoli Linda, Lavretsky Helen
Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles, 341 Haines Hall, 375 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA.
Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, University of California, Los Angeles, 760 Westwood Plaza, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1759, USA.
Evol Med Public Health. 2021 Oct 1;9(1):322-331. doi: 10.1093/emph/eoab027. eCollection 2021.
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 postindustrial 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 postmenopausal cognitive performance.
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.
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 (-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.
We add to the growing list of lifespan health correlates of breastfeeding for women's health, such as the lower risk of type-2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and breast cancer. We surmise that women's postmenopausal cognitive competence may have been greater in past environments in which breastfeeding was more prevalent, bolstering the possibility that postmenopausal longevity may have been adaptive across human evolutionary history.
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.
母乳喂养的女性除了对其母乳喂养的孩子有更为人熟知的益处外，自身健康也可能获得长期益处。母乳喂养可能会对与大脑健康相关的生物心理社会系统产生长期影响。此外，由于后工业化时代母乳喂养减少，了解母乳喂养对推测人类群体过去的母体表型的终生影响非常重要。在此，我们评估女性的母乳喂养史与绝经后认知表现之间的关系。
通过两项临床试验招募了南加州50岁及以上的女性便利样本，她们完成了一套全面的神经心理测试，并回答了一份关于生殖生活史的问卷。通用线性模型检验了抑郁和非抑郁女性的认知领域得分是否与母乳喂养相关，并对年龄、教育程度和种族进行了控制分析。
与未母乳喂养的女性相比，母乳喂养的女性在学习、延迟回忆、执行功能和处理速度等领域表现更优（p值为0.0003 - 0.015） 这四个领域在所研究队列中限于非抑郁且已生育的子集中的分析中仍然显著。在抑郁女性中，只有执行功能和处理速度与母乳喂养呈正相关。
我们进一步丰富了母乳喂养与女性终生健康相关性的列表，比如降低患2型糖尿病、心血管疾病和乳腺癌的风险。我们推测，在过去母乳喂养更为普遍的环境中女性的绝经后认知能力可能更强，这支持了绝经后长寿在人类进化历史中或许具有适应性的可能性。
母乳喂养可能会影响女性的认知表现。母乳喂养带来的生物学效应和心理社会效应，比如改善压力调节，可能会给母亲的大脑带来长期益处。我们发现，与未母乳喂养的女性相比，母乳喂养的女性在晚年的一系列认知测试中表现更好。
