Good news for new mothers: A study suggests that carefully regulated formula feeding before your milk comes in will not harm your baby ability to breast-feed, and done properly, it may even help in the long run.
Exclusive breast-feeding is widely encouraged, but a study published on Monday in the journal Pediatrics is the first randomized trial of the effects of brief early formula use on future breast-feeding success.
Researchers randomly assigned 38 infants who had lost 5 percent or more of their weight in the days after birth to either breast-feeding alone (the controls), or breast-feeding along with a supplement of formula at the end of each session.
At 1 week of age, all were still breast-feeding, but 9 of 19 infants in the control group were now using formula, compared with only 2 in the group that had used formula at the start. By age 3 months, 79 percent of the early formula users were breastfeeding exclusively, compared with 42 percent of the controls.
The researchers emphasize that they used a careful procedure ? small volumes of formula and careful administration with a syringe to prevent confusion between breast and bottle nipple.
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