RESEARCH ARTICLE


Breastfeeding During Early Infancy is Associated with Higher Weight- Based World Health Organization Anthropometry



Daniel H. Libraty1, *, Rosario Z. Capeding2, 3, AnaMae Obcena2, Job D. Brion4, Veronica Tallo5
1 Division of Infectious Disease and Immunology, Department of Medicine, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, MA, USA
2 Department of Medicine, Research Institute for Tropical Medicine, Manila, Philippines
3 Department of Microbiology, Research Institute for Tropical Medicine, Manila, Philippines
4 San Pablo City Health Office, San Pablo, Philippines
5 Department of Epidemiology, Research Institute for Tropical Medicine, Manila, Philippines

Article Information


Identifiers and Pagination:

Year: 2013
Volume: 7
First Page: 38
Last Page: 39
Publisher Id: TOPEDJ-7-38
DOI: 10.2174/1874309920130610001

Article History:

Received Date: 30/03/2013
Revision Received Date: 17/05/2013
Acceptance Date: 03/06/2013
Electronic publication date: 28/6/2013
Collection year: 2013

© 2013 Libraty et al.

open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

* Address correspondence to this author at the Rm S6-862, Division of ID, UMMS, 55 Lake Ave N, Worcester, MA 01655, USA; E-mail: daniel.libraty@umassmed.edu


Abstract

The World Health Organization (WHO) Expert Committee on Physical Status: The Use and Interpretation of Anthropometry established reference anthropometric standards for the growth of healthy infants and children. As part of a prospective clinical study of dengue virus infections in infants, we measured the length and weight of healthy infants in San Pablo, Laguna, Philippines at two scheduled study visits. We examined the correlation between breastfeeding and WHO anthropometric z scores during early infancy in San Pablo, Laguna, Philippines. We found that breastfeeding status and the frequency of breastfeeding during early infancy positively correlated with weight-based WHO anthropometric z scores.

Keywords: Breastfeeding, infant, anthropometry, weight, nutrition, bottle-feeding.