Women who develop gestational diabetes during pregnancy may be less likely to develop diabetes again after delivery if they breastfeed their babies, a U.S. study suggests.
Researchers followed about 1,000 women with gestational diabetes to see whether they developed another form of the disease, called type 2 diabetes, within two years of giving birth.
Compared with women who didn’t breastfeed at all, those who were exclusively breastfeeding at six to nine weeks postpartum were 54 percent less likely to develop type 2 diabetes, the study found. Women who fed infants mostly breast milk were 46 percent less likely to develop diabetes and those whose babies had a combination of formula and breast milk were 36 percent less likely to develop diabetes.
“Any level of breastfeeding for at least two months was associated with lower risk of diabetes in women within two years of delivery,” said lead study author Erica Gunderson, a researcher in cardiovascular and metabolic conditions at Kaiser Permanente Northern California in Oakland.
Both breastfeeding and pumping milk to feed babies in bottles may be protective against diabetes, Gunderson added by email.
“This finding lends support to the idea that breastfeeding may have biological effects on metabolism and cellular functions that can ‘reset’ the metabolism to the more favorable preconception state and constitute recovery from pregnancy’s physiological adaptations,” Gunderson said.
Gestational diabetes, an inability to make or process enough of the hormone insulin to maintain healthy levels of glucose, or sugars, in the blood, occurs in 5 to 9 percent of U.S. pregnancies, Gunderson and colleagues note in the Annals of Internal Medicine. Women who have gestational diabetes have a seven-fold greater risk of developing type 2 diabetes than women who don’t experience this complication during pregnancy.
While breastfeeding has previously been linked to improved glucose metabolism, its role in preventing type 2 diabetes after gestational diabetes is less clear, the researchers note.
In the current study, compared to the women who didn’t breastfeed at all or who stopped within two months of delivery, women who continued up to five months were 45 percent less likely to develop type 2 diabetes. The women who kept breastfeeding up to 10 months were 50 percent less likely to develop diabetes, and those who stuck with it even longer had 57 percent lower odds.
Limitations of the study include the lack of data on other factors that might influence the development of diabetes and the inability to evaluate the association between breastfeeding and diabetes risk beyond two years, the authors acknowledge.
Even so, the findings may bolster medical guidelines recommending that women breastfeed babies exclusively for six months, a practice that has numerous other health benefits for women and their babies, said Alison Stuebe, a researcher at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine and the Carolina Global Breastfeeding Institute.
“This paper adds to a decade of research that links longer durations of breastfeeding with lower risks of maternal metabolic diseases, including diabetes, hypertension and heart attacks,” Stuebe, who wasn’t involved in the study, said by email.
“This is important because women with gestational diabetes are at especially high risk of type two diabetes, (high blood pressure) and heart disease later in life,” Stuebe said. “They are also less likely to start out breastfeeding and tend to wean earlier than moms without gestational diabetes.”