Breast-feeding in early months might raise child’s verbal IQ

The study in the Archives of General Psychiatry found that 6-year-olds whose mothers were part of a programme that encouraged them to breast-feed had a verbal IQ that was 7.5 points higher that children in a control group. The researchers said their findings suggested that the longer an infant is fed exclusively breast milk, the greater the IQ improvement.

The results echo smaller previous studies that found children and adults who were breast-fed tend to have higher IQs than whose who were not. Lead author Dr. Michael Kramer, a professor of pediatrics at McGill University in Montreal, said the IQ improvements were modest and might not be noticeable on an individual basis. But he added that the increase could have a significant effect on society as a whole.

“We’re not talking about making a child who has trouble in school and is dropping out into a genius,” he said. “But if we can increase IQ by three to four points in the whole population we can have fewer children at the low end and more Einsteins at the high end.”

At the end of three months, 72 percent of infants in the experimental group were still breast-feeding to some degree, compared

All children in the study were interviewed and examined between 2002 and 2005, when the children were an average of 6.5 years old. The children’s academic performance also was evaluated by their teachers.

Besides the improvement in their verbal IQ scores, children in the experimental group scored an average of 4.9 points higher on tests that specifically measured vocabulary.