Two additional months of full breast-feeding may make a big difference in the number of upper respiratory infections a child suffers.
A new study has found that babies whose mothers stopped breast-feeding them between the ages of 4 months and 6 months had a risk of recurrent middle ear infections twice as great and a risk of pneumonia four times as great as babies who were exclusively breast-fed until 6 months or older.
The study, published in February in Pediatrics, followed the children until they were 2 years old.
Stopping full breast-feeding at 4 months increased the risk of infection even more than day care attendance or exposure to smoke.
"I was a little surprised that the effect was so large," said Dr. Caroline J. Chantry, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of California, Davis, and the study's lead author.
The longer the duration of breast-feeding, the study found, the greater the protection, and the protective effect endured until the children were 2, even when exclusive breast-feeding stopped at 6 months.
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