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NEW YORK, Mar 05 (Reuters Health) - Although small or premature babies born in developed nations often catch up with their normal birth weight peers, the same is not true in developing nations, researchers report.
Now, new research suggests that exclusive breast-feeding can help such tiny infants grow more rapidly, although they may still linger behind their peers in size and weight.
Dr. Abdullah Baqui and associates from Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, looked at infants born to mothers residing in the slums of Dhaka City, capitol of the People's Republic of Bangladesh.
Almost half the infants qualified as low birth weight because they weighed less than 5 pounds at birth. Seventeen percent of all infants were born preterm, the authors report in the March issue of the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
Only about half of the infants were exclusively breast-fed during their first month of life, the report indicates, and by 3 months fewer than one-quarter received breast milk as their only source of nutrition.
At age 6 months, infants who were both low birth weight and premature ended up weighing 2 pounds less and being 1 or 2 inches shorter than normal birth weight, full-term infants.
However, breast-fed infants grew more quickly than did infants who were partially or not breast-fed, the results indicate, with breast-fed infants weighing one-quarter pound more and growing one-quarter inch longer by the end of 3 months.
The findings show that giving food instead of milk before 6 months of age is not necessary and may be detrimental in countries such as Bangladesh, the researchers report.
"This study highlights the importance of size and maturity at birth in determining infant growth in a poor urban community in Bangladesh and re-emphasizes the need for improving fetal growth as a first step towards improving childhood nutritional status," Baqui and colleagues write.
The study also gives "renewed impetus to the efforts for the promotion of breast-feeding, especially exclusive breast-feeding to the first 6 months of life," the authors conclude.
SOURCE: European Journal of Clinical Nutrition 2001;55.
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