Saturday, March 29, 2008

Breast-Fed Babies Unlikely To Develop Type-2 Diabetes Later!

Childhood obesity and the emergence of type-2 diabetes in youth have become a major health problem for many countries. This has actually prompted many researches to identify lifestyle approaches to primary prevention of both conditions.

A recent paper, published in the medical journal Diabetes Care by a team of researchers from the University of South Carolina, Columbia, revealed that breast-fed babies are less likely to develop type-2 diabetes when they become adolescence.

In order to investigate factors related to the development of type-2 diabetes in individuals between 10 to 21 years old, the researchers employed a subset of data from a larger study. The analysis included 80 subjects with type-2 diabetes who were compared to 167 'controls' without diabetes.

As compared with the control subjects, the breast-feeding rate was actually lower for subjects with type-2 diabetes. The rates of breast-feeding used in the study for the 3 ethnic groups were: 20 versus 27 per cent for African Americans; 50 versus 84 per cent for Hispanics; and 39 per cent versus 78 per cent for non-Hispanic whites, respectively.

Irrespective of ethnic group, the protective effect of breast-feeding against type-2 diabetes was mainly attributable to its effect in moderating current childhood weight. Nevertheless, breast-feeding in itself had a protective effect

With all other well-established reasons for breast-feeding, the researchers concluded that renewed efforts to encourage breast-feeding in populations at high risk for type-2 diabetes may be useful.

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