Breast Milk Linked to Disease Protection in Infants

Breast Milk Linked to Disease Protection in Infants
Breast Milk Linked to Disease Protection in Infants. Credit | Getty images

United States – Breast milk is well known to have numerous advantages for would-be moms and their babies. Recently, a global investigation has established that the antibodies transmitted from a mother to a baby through breast milk can protect against diseases.

These included the antibodies in the immune system against one popular form of infection, namely the rotavirus, says a team at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York, as reported by HealthDay.

Link Between Breast Milk and Rotavirus Protection

“It was pleasing to be able to identify such a direct relationship between the significantly higher antibody levels and the delay of getting rotavirus,” said Dr. Kirsi Jarvinen-Seppo, the lead author of the study and a professor of allergy and immunology at the university’s Golisano Children’s Hospital.

The latest was sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and has been published recently in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

Global Scope of Research

The study used breast milk samples of 695 women in five countries, namely Finland, United States, Pakistan, Perú, and Bangladesh.

Jarvinen-Seppo and her team collected samples of certain IgA and IgG immune system antibodies in breast milk and compared them to 1,607 proteins from 30 disease-associated bacteria.

It was for this reason that an attempt was made to get participants from all over the world.

“We would expect to find differences in antibody levels in different countries due to different diseases circulating among areas of the world, but this is one of the first times that there’s been a head-to-head comparison for dozens of pathogens across several continents,” Jarvinen-Seppo explained in a university news release.

This research discovered that breast milk from the mothers who had high levels of the IgA and IgG immune system antibodies were associated with the babies’ defense mechanisms against rotavirus that causes severe and at times fatal diarrhea.

The researcher further observed that moms residing in low and middle-income countries had higher concentrations of protective IgA antibodies in their breast milk compared to their counterparts in the developed countries.

Higher Antibodies in Low-Income Countries

That was particularly true of antibodies against the germs that cause Shigella and pneumococcus, two major killers of babies and children in poor countries.

There was one unexpected finding: Normal-weight women had overall higher levels of protective antibodies in their breast milk than women who were overweight or obese, as reported by HealthDay.

That was counterintuitive, said Jarvinen-Seppo.

Unexpected Findings on Maternal Weight

“We had anticipated that underweight mothers might have lower antibody levels due to poorer nutritional status,” she said. “Due to rising obesity rates worldwide, this could be a significant finding, but this is preliminary, and additional research is needed since this is the first time this has been measured.”