In a prospective study of over 1,300 mother-child pairs enrolled in Project Viva, child cognition was assessed at 3 and 7 years of age using standardized assessment tools to examine any relationship to breastfeeding duration and exclusivity. Maternal fish intake during lactation was also evaluated to explore possible effects of diet on breastfeeding/cognition associations.
Results indicated that longer breastfeeding duration was associated with greater receptive language skills at age 3 and higher intelligence at age 7. Additionally, at the age 3 assessment, the children of mothers whose diet included 2 or more servings of fish per week performed better in visual-motor skills than those whose mothers consumed less than 2 servings per week.
Senior author Emily Oken, MD, MPH, believes examining the relationship between breastfeeding and cognitive development is important because few studies have quantified breastfeeding duration and exclusivity, or have explored the potential effect of the diet of breastfeeding mothers.