Even today, with everything we know about breast milk I am still amazed when I see that health professionals do not do everything possible, and impossible, to get mothers who want to breastfeed to get it.
Of those who choose not to give it I do not speak, because you can not force someone to do something they do not want, but I do do it of those who want to breastfeed their children and can not, because even if they continue to hear that of "if total, bottle children are raised equally well, "it is sometimes necessary to know the data to act accordingly.
A recent study has quantified the benefits of breast milk in premature babies and has found that thanks to it babies enter less in neonatal ICUs and that, consequently, they reach save up to 23,000 euros per child.
Premature babies generate a lot of cost
Babies born with very low birth weight, that is, weighing less than 1500 grams, are considered high risk of mortality and are among hospital patients who spend more resources.
AdvertisingPoor people, nobody talks about saving sparing the best care. If you have to spend those resources to heal them, heal them and take care of them, of course, but it is surprising that one of the methods that works best is precisely one of the most economical: get them to drink breast milk.
And it is that children of low birth weight, when they are also premature, are at risk of sepsis of late onset, bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD), necrotizing enterocolitis and retinopathy of prematurity, all of them diseases with significant economic consequences in the short long term.
In the study that I am telling you today, you have decided to calculate the expense generated by premature babies and have seen that the cost of such a child ranges from $ 10,055 (€ 7,300) if the baby has a late sepsis until $ 31,565 (€ 23,000) if you suffer from a BPD.
Breast milk prevents these diseases
Breast milk has proven capable of reduce the incidence and severity of some of these diseases and, consequently, it has an impact on the cost of the work performed in the NICUs.
To find out, the aforementioned study was conducted with 430 couples of mothers and babies at the Rush University Medical Center in Chicago and they saw that children who drank breast milk suffered 19% less bacterial infections than the rest.
If the baby also drank only breast milk for 14 days, it reduced three times the risk of developing neonatal necrotizing enterocolitis (ENN), a very common disease in premature children, which is considered serious and has a mortality of 25%.
In addition, they saw that the more breast milk administered, the better the results. To do this, obviously, NICUs need to be enabled for the presence of the mother and continuous skin-to-skin contact, which helps breastfeeding, and also have a milk bank, in order to reach premature babies who do not breastfed breast milk as if it were a drug.
It won't be for much ...
I repeat, on many occasions I read and hear people talk about breast milk with a "will not be so much." It is true that in healthy children the visible difference is smaller, basically because healthy children are not in danger of death or serious illnesses such as premature ones. However there are long term risks, such as the risk of suffering from type I and II diabetes, obesity, otitis, leukemia, etc., which is higher when babies are not breastfed.
Of course, it is very difficult to tell someone "you are diabetic because as a child you did not drink enough breast milk," or "you may have leukemia because you were not breastfed," because it is very difficult to establish individual causality, but apparently when globally, with many cases, the relationship exists (which I do not say, that says the AAP).
Let's look at it from another prism and maybe professionals will not throw in the towel as soon as possible, they will recycle more and more and better and they can help mothers to breastfeed: artificial milk increases the income of premature babies in neonatal ICUs and increases the cost of care by up to 23,000 euros. I said the same as in the headline, but vice versa. Why now artificial milk does not seem like panacea? Let us leave it as a resource to grab in case there is no available breast milk and not as a "well, you see, I took a bottle and here I am."
