Breastfeeding patterns in exclusively breastfed infants: a longitudinal prospective study in Uppsala, Sweden

Exclusive breastfeeding was studied among 506 infants in Uppsala, Sweden, b ased on daily recordings during the first 6 mo. The mothers had previously breastfed at least one infant for at least 4 mo. Most of the mothers consid ered that they breastfed on demand. Wide variations in breastfeeding freque ncy and suckling duration were found both between different infants and in the individual infant over time. At 2 wk, the mean frequency of daytime fee ds (based on one 13-d record) between different infants ranged from 2.9 to 10.8 and night-time feeds from 1.0 to 5.1. The daytime suckling duration (b ased on one 24-h record) ranged from 20 min to 4h 35 min and night-time dur ation from 0 to 2h 8 min. At any given age, a maximum of only 2% of the inf ants were not breastfed during the night. At 4 mo, 95% of the infants were breastfeeding and 40% were exclusively breastfed at this age. Longer breast feeding duration and longer duration of exclusive breastfeeding were both a ssociated with higher frequency of breastfeeds, longer breastfeeding of the previous child and higher education. No gender differences were found. Mat ernal smoking was associated with shorter duration of exclusive breastfeedi ng, and pacifier use was associated with shorter duration of both exclusive breastfeeding and total breastfeeding. This study confirms that every moth er-infant pair needs to be understood as a unique dyad throughout lactation . These data demonstrate a wide range of patterns among women who are exclu sively breastfeeding and indicate that it would be inappropriate to put pre ssure on individual families to adopt preconceived patterns of infant feedi ng.