Dataset Information

Women who breastfeed exhibit cognitive benefits after age 50

ABSTRACT: Abstract

Background and objectives

Women who breastfeed may experience long-term benefits for their health in addition to the more widely appreciated effects on the breastfed child. Breastfeeding may induce long-term effects on biopsychosocial systems implicated in brain health. Also, due to diminished breastfeeding in the postindustrial era, it is important to understand the lifespan implications of breastfeeding for surmising maternal phenotypes in our species’ collective past. Here, we assess how women’s breastfeeding history relates to postmenopausal cognitive performance.

Methodology

A convenience sample of Southern California women age 50+ was recruited via two clinical trials, completed a comprehensive neuropsychological test battery and answered a questionnaire about reproductive life history. General linear models examined whether cognitive domain scores were associated with breastfeeding in depressed and non-depressed women, controlling for age, education and ethnicity.

Results

Women who breastfed exhibited superior performance in the domains of Learning, Delayed Recall, Executive Functioning and Processing Speed compared to women who did not breastfeed (P-values 0.0003–0.015). These four domains remained significant in analyses limited to non-depressed and parous subsets of the cohort. Among those depressed, only Executive Functioning and Processing Speed were positively associated with breastfeeding.

Conclusions and implications

We add to the growing list of lifespan health correlates of breastfeeding for women’s health, such as the lower risk of type-2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and breast cancer. We surmise that women’s postmenopausal cognitive competence may have been greater in past environments in which breastfeeding was more prevalent, bolstering the possibility that postmenopausal longevity may have been adaptive across human evolutionary history.

Lay Summary

Breastfeeding may affect women’s cognitive performance. Breastfeeding’s biological effects and psychosocial effects, such as improved stress regulation, could exert long-term benefits for the mother’s brain. We found that women who breastfed performed better on a series of cognitive tests in later life compared to women who did not breastfeed.

SUBMITTER: Fox M

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8573189 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:IMPORTANCE:Postmenopausal hormone therapy with conjugated equine estrogens (CEEs) may adversely affect older women’s cognitive function. It is not known whether this extends to younger women. OBJECTIVE:To test whether prescribing CEE-based hormone therapy to postmenopausal women aged 50 to 55 years has longer-term effects on cognitive function. DESIGN:Trained, masked staff assessed participants with an annual telephone-administered cognitive battery that included measures of global and domain-specific cognitive functions. Cognitive testing was conducted an average of 7.2 years after the trials ended, when women had a mean age of 67.2 years, and repeated 1 year later. Enrollment occurred from 1996 through 1999. SETTING:Forty academic research centers. PARTICIPANTS:The study population comprised 1326 postmenopausal women, who had begun treatment in 2 randomized placebo-controlled clinical trials of hormone therapy when aged 50 to 55 years. INTERVENTION:The clinical trials in which the women had participated had compared 0.625 mg CEE with or without 2.5 mg medroxyprogesterone acetate over a mean of 7.0 years. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES:The primary outcome was global cognitive function. Secondary outcomes were verbal memory, attention, executive function, verbal fluency, and working memory. RESULTS:Global cognitive function scores from women who had been assigned to CEE-based therapies were similar to those from women assigned to placebo: mean (95% CI) intervention effect of 0.02 (?0.08 to 0.12) standard deviation units (P = .66). Similarly, no overall differences were found for any individual cognitive domain (all P > .15). Prespecified subgroup analyses found some evidence that CEE-based therapies may have adversely affected verbal fluency among women who had prior hysterectomy or prior use of hormone therapy: mean treatment effects of ?0.17 (?0.33 to ?0.02) and ?0.25 (?0.42 to ?0.08), respectively; however, this may be a chance finding. CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE:CEE-based therapies produced no overall sustained benefit or risk to cognitive function when administered to postmenopausal women aged 50 to 55 years. We are not able to address whether initiating hormone therapy during menopause and maintaining therapy until any symptoms are passed affects cognitive function, either in the short or longer term. TRIAL REGISTRATION:clinicaltrials.gov Identifier: NCT01124773.