Benefits of exclusive breastfeeding: An integrative review

Abstract

Background & Aim: The importance of breastfeeding and its exclusivity in the first six months of a child’s life is worldwide recognized. Despite that adherence to exclusive breastfeeding is far from international standards. Therefore, updating evidence on this topic is essential to demonstrate to parents and health professionals the benefits of exclusive breastfeeding, demystifying ideas, and promoting adherence.
 Methods & Materials: An integrative review was conducted with a search in Medline, SciELO, and CINHAL databases, with the descriptors “breastfeeding", "breast", "feeding", "breastfeeding", "exclusive" and "benefits”, combined with the Boolean operator "AND" and “OR”, for studies published between 2014 and 2019. Of the 221 studies identified, eight were included for review.
 Results: Short-term and long-term benefits of exclusive breastfeeding for children were identified such as healthier eating habits, reduced length of hospital stay, favorable weight increase, lower body mass index, lower adiposity, lower total cholesterol values, better cognitive and behavioral development, as well as stability of metabolic levels in children with metabolic disorders.
 Conclusion: There are benefits for exclusive breastfeeding that must be explained to parents. Nurses must incorporate the best available evidence into their practice to enable parents to realize the impact of the choice of exclusive breastfeeding on the child's health, increasing their adherence.

Does the place of residence affect the achievement of exclusive breastfeeding? A study in Eastern Indonesia

“…For babies, EBF was identified such as healthier eating habits, reduced length of hospital stay, favorable weight increase, lower body mass index, lower adiposity, lower total cholesterol values, better cognitive and behavioral development, as well as stability of metabolic levels in children with metabolic disorders. Meanwhile, for mothers, EBF can protect mothers from the risk of ovarian and breast cancer because it is a portion of safe baby food and also reduces obesity (MacVicar, Humphrey and Forbes-McKay, 2018;Fan et al, 2019;Couto, Dias and Oliveira, 2020).…”

Telehealth and maternity

“…A meta-analyses of three studies (Flax et al, 2014;Jiang et al, 2014;Sellen et al, 2013) judged to be sufficiently homogenous showed that delivering prenatal breastfeeding interventions using SMS/cell phone (vs routine prenatal care) improved rates of initiation of breastfeeding within one hour after birth and increased the likelihood of exclusive breastfeeding for up to six months, although there was no strong evidence regarding the giving of colostrum or breast milk within three days after birth. This evidence of the effect of telehealth interventions on breastfeeding rates is important as some of the short-term and long-term benefits of exclusive breastfeeding for children include healthier eating habits, reduced length of hospital stay, favourable weight increase, lower body mass index, lower adiposity, lower total cholesterol values, better cognitive and behavioural development, as well as stability of metabolic levels in children with metabolic disorders (Couto et al, 2020). Unfortunately, the existing evidence from this review (Lee et al, 2016) is of moderate quality and lacks the methodological rigor expected.…”

Lactation Counseling for Maintaining Exclusive Breastfeeding in Adolescent Mothers: A Trial Protocol

“…Breast milk is the natural and optimal source of nutrition for the newborn; it is associated with multiple health bene ts (1,2), providing nutrients, hormonal immunoactives, and microbiomes necessary for growth and development (3). Furthermore, in the mother, it reduces the probability of breast and ovarian cancers, improves birth spacing, prevents type-2 diabetes, obesity and hypertension, among other bene ts (4,5).…”