PROVIDENCE – A Women & Infants Hospital researcher’s recent study suggests a connection between breast feeding and genetic changes that help babies better cope with stress.
The research, published in the September 2018 edition of Pediatrics, was led by Barry M. Lester, director of Women & Infants Hospital’s Brown Center for the Study of Children at Risk, a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University and member of Care New England Medical Group.
“What we found is that maternal care changes the activity of a gene in their infants that regulates the infant’s physiological response to stress, specifically the release of the hormone cortisol,” Lester said.
Lester and his colleagues looked at more than 40 full-term, healthy infants and their mothers, half of whom breastfed for the first five months and half of whom did not. They measured the cortisol stress reactivity in infant saliva using a mother-infant interaction procedure and the DNA methylation (changing the activity of the DNA segment without changing its sequence) of an important regulatory region of the glucocorticoid receptor gene, which regulates development, metabolism and immune response.
“Breastfeeding was associated with decreased DNA methylation and decreased cortisol reactivity in the infants. In other words, there was an epigenetic change in the babies who were breastfed, resulting in reduced stress than those who were not breastfed,” said Lester.
The research team also included Linda LaGasse and Dr. James F. Padbury, of Women & Infants Hospital/Warren Alpert Medical School; Elisabeth Condradt of the University of Utah; Edward Tronick of the University of Massachusetts Boston; and Carmen Marsit of Emory University.
Rob Borkowski is a PBN staff writer. Email him at Borkowski@PBN.com.
