The lactation consultant doesn’t mention this part. Somewhere between latching advice and nipple cream, nobody brings up that breastfeeding might affect your mental health when your kid is in fifth grade. Sounds like a stretch. But 168 Irish mothers tracked over ten years suggest otherwise.
Women who breastfed were less likely to report depression or anxiety at the decade mark. Each week of exclusive nursing cut the odds by about 2 percent. Small, sure. But that’s per week. Six months across two children and you’re looking at a meaningful difference.
The findings come from University College Dublin’s ROLO cohort, published in BMJ Open. Participants averaged 42 by the final check-in. Thirteen percent reported current depression or anxiety.
Old News, New Timeline
Breastfeeding protecting against postnatal depression? We knew that. Hormones, oxytocin, skin contact. The question was whether anything stuck around once the fog lifted and babies started sleeping.
Looks like it might. Thirty-seven percent of these women had nursed for at least a year total across thier kids. Those struggling with mental health at year ten were consistently the ones who’d breastfed less. Or not at all.
“The finding that breastfeeding may reduce mothers’ later life chance of depression and anxiety is very exciting and is another great reason to support our mothers to breastfeed,” Professor Fionnuala McAuliffe explains.
McAuliffe runs obstetrics research at UCD. She’s making a policy argument. Better maternity leave, pumping rooms at work. If the data holds, it gets harder to say no.
Correlation Doing Its Usual Thing
Here’s the problem. Women who are already depressed or anxious have a harder time breastfeeding. And the same stuff that makes extended nursing possible, decent leave, helpful partners, bosses who aren’t terrible, also protects mental health on its own. Untangling cause from correlation? Good luck.
The anxious women at year ten had been younger at the start. Less active too. These baseline gaps complicate things. Statistical adjustments help but they don’t fix everything.
Something’s happening though. The hormones, the forced pauses in otherwise chaotic days, the physical closeness that nursing requires. Whether that builds resiliance or just travels alongside other protective factors, the researchers can’t say. They use “bidirectional” which mostly means the arrow points both ways and they’re not sure which matters more.
Mothers shouldn’t read this as a guarantee. But those exhausting early months may leave traces that take years to show up. Or they correlate with other things that do. Seperating the two is genuinely difficult, and this study doesn’t pretend to have solved it.
DOI: 10.1136/bmjopen-2024-097323
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I do not believe this at all. I nursed my child for almost 2 years and I am nearing my child’s 8th birthday. I am quite depressed and do take medication.