Being the non medical type I am, I have no idea what the Lancet is, but I wondered if any of the more medical literate dopers had seen this and knew more.
The article I linked to didn’t seem to give any information on why this was the case, so it left me with the question of…
Supposition: (i.e. I’ve heard anecdotally this can happen, but never seen it) a sexually mature woman can be caused to lactate even though she has not been pregnant recently.
Query: If supposition is true, would there be any benefit to her doing so?
I understand from the linked article that this is no silver bullet, and apparently is not a huge reduction in the chance of developing breast cancer, but I’m just curious about the mechanism. Is this something that would only benefit someone who’s given birth or can any woman benefit?
(Besides, hey, it mentioned breasts… of course I read it.)
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It’s one of the more prestigious medical journals. British, I believe.
Note, however, that scientific papers generally include a great many qualifiers (“Our preliminary research seems to suggest the possibility of a link between breast-feeding and reduced risk of certain types of cancer”), whereas the popular media tend to make things out to be much more definite (“Breast feeding prevents cancer”).
It is very hard to induce lactation with no pregnancy in the picture, but it can be done. Sometimes women who are about to adopt (and have the time and willingness) can induce by pumping for a few hours every day. Sometimes they can make enough to exclusively nurse the baby, sometimes not.
There was/is quite a movement afoot to get adoptive moms to lactate. It’s promoted by La Leche. They are to breastfeeding what Robert DeNiro is to Tribeca- without one, the other whithers and goes fallow.
When we adopted, it took roughly 11 nanoseconds for the Wifestrocity to chose NOT to breastfeed our adopted kids. The Man-Cub was coming at the age of 6 MONTHS !
Anyway, we’d read up on it a bit regardless. It sounded a bit eerie to us, but different strokes for different folks. The self-pumping, along with a choice hormone cocktail can indeed induce lactation. I dunno about the early milk that is released during the first few days of a baby’s life ( the name of which escapes me at the moment ). I’ve no idea if that would be produced under the artificial environment discussed above, or not.
I dunno either, but I do know that it’s called “colostrum”, for those of you who were dying to know.
For the record, I’ve been to a La Leche League meeting or two, and the ladies there were all very nice and friendly and bore absolutely no resemblance to Robert DeNiro. Also, I somehow doubt that breastfeeding would wither up and die without them. (Yes, yes, I know you were kidding.)
Here’s an article from ABCNews.com that explains the findings in a bit more detail, if anyone is interested. Choice quote:
As far as artificially inducing lactation, I don’t know if it would confer the same protection against breast cancer, but it certainly would be interesting, no? Maybe with all the non-pregnant women who were lactating, we could set up milk banks, much like blood banks, to provide breastmilk to infants whose mothers weren’t able to breastfeed for whatever reason. I mean, to lactate you have to continue to express milk, or the milk dries up, and it would seem like a big waste to just chuck all that perfectly good milk down the drain.
It’s also possible that it’s not the effect of breastfeeding on the breast, but the effect of breastfeeding on the female endocrine system in general. Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point and a regular writer on science and business topics for The New Yorker, published an article in that magazine a few years ago in which he discussed as part of the overall theme of the article the evidence that suggests a correlation between the number of times a woman menstruates during her reproductive years and the risk of breast cancer. Gladwell generally gets things right when discussing the research of others and presents what’s known pretty fairly and accurately. In any event, it’s a fascinating article.
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