New Breast Pumping Technique Can Help Preemie Moms
Posted on Friday, July 17th, 2009 and is filed under Parenting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Moms who give birth prematurely can sometimes have problems producing enough breast milk, but a new breast pumping technique approach can most likely solve the problem.
Researchers from Lucile Packard Children’s hospital and the Stanford University School of Medicine state that moms have the best tools at hand for supplying enough breast milk for their infants: their hands.
In a study, over 60 moms learned the hand-expression techniques, in addition to using a breast pump to extract milk. They produced plentiful milk supplies. The women studied gave birth 10 weeks early and did not produce milk when the babies were born.
“We were worried about mothers of preterm babies establishing any milk supply, much less an average-or-better supply,” said William Rhine, MD, a neonatologist at Packard Children’s and the study’s senior author. The findings contradict widely held assumptions that premature delivery lessens the hormone signals needed to establish breast-feeding.
Previous studies have shown that women who are overweight, give cesarean births, deliver twins or conceive via in vitro fertilization are at a greater risk of under producing breast milk. A low milk supply is one reason why moms stop breast-feeding.
See the hand-expression technique here.
