NEW YORK, Mar 09 (Reuters Health) - A lack of confidence, rather than a lack of knowledge, may lead low-income women to quit breast-feeding, results of a study suggest.

Because experts recognize that breast milk is the best nutrition source for infants and offers many advantages over formula, the Department of Health and Human Services last year set as a target that half of US newborns should be breast-fed for 6 months.

However, in a study of 64 mostly minority, single women enrolled in a health program for low-income women and their children in Connecticut, nearly 90% had stopped breast-feeding after 1 month. By the first week, 27% of women quit. After 2 months, 70% had quit, and after 4 months, 89% had quit.

New mothers who initially said that they were not confident that they would breast-feed longer than 2 months were more than twice as likely to have quit after just 2 weeks. And although more than 90% of women knew the benefits of breast-feeding, those who believed that babies prefer bottle to breast were over 1.5 times more likely to have quit after 2 weeks.

Women did not tend to quit over concerns that they were not producing enough milk to support their infants.

The researchers, led by Dr. Ilgi Ozturk Ertem from Ankara University in Turkey, conclude that to encourage longer breast-feeding in this population, officials will need to shift their focus from teaching about breast-feeding and managing breast-feeding problems to enhancing mothers' confidence and changing beliefs about infants' preferences.

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