Heart problems: breast milk protects premature babies

Christiane Fux studied journalism and psychology in Hamburg. The experienced medical editor has been writing magazine articles, news and factual texts on all conceivable health topics since 2001. In addition to her work for, Christiane Fux is also active in prose. Her first crime novel was published in 2012, and she also writes, designs and publishes her own crime plays.

More posts by Christiane Fux All content is checked by medical journalists.

Children who are born prematurely often still struggle with health problems as adults. One of them are the comparatively small chambers of the heart, which reduce the performance of the heart. A simple measure could protect against this: the consistent administration of breast milk.

Researchers around Afif EL-Khuffash from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland in Dublin had examined the health development of 46 adults who had been born prematurely. 30 of them had received only breast milk during their hospital stay after the birth, 16 had received a special substitute milk.

Between the ages of 23 and 28, the participants underwent extensive cardiovascular examinations. This also included a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) examination of their hearts. This allows the structure and function of the heart to be made visible.

Smaller chambers of the heart

As expected, all participants' ventricles were smaller compared to people who were not born prematurely. However, the deviation was less pronounced in participants who had received breast milk.

Breast milk seems to have a protective effect on the structural development of the heart. The researchers suspect that milk helps regulate hormones and growth factors. It could also reduce inflammatory processes, strengthen the child's immune system and improve the children's metabolism.

Eight percent of children come too early

A premature birth is not a rare occurrence. In Germany, around 63,000 children are born before the 37th week of pregnancy every year - that is around eight percent of newborns. Around 8,000 of these are premature babies born before the 30th week of pregnancy.

More and more of them not only survive, but also develop normally. But the younger, lighter and more immature the children are at birth, the higher their risk of various mental and physical developmental disorders.