Breast-feeding history and overweight in Latino preschoolers.
OBJECTIVE
Describe the relationship between breast-feeding history and risk of overweight in the preschool years in a sample of primarily Mexican-origin Latinos.


METHODS
Children's breast-feeding history, health history, and demographics were obtained in interviewer-administered questionnaires of a convenience sample of 364 parents of children ages 2-5 in an outpatient clinic waiting room serving a predominantly Mexican immigrant population in a large Midwestern city. Child weight status was determined by weighing and measuring each child and calculating age- and sex-specific body mass index (BMI) percentile using 2000 Centers for Disease Control reference values, with children > or =95th percentile defined as overweight.


RESULTS
Seventy-six of 364 children (21%) were overweight. Eighty-seven percent of children had been breast-fed. Increased duration of breast-feeding was associated with a linearly decreased risk of overweight in bivariate analysis, ranging from an overweight prevalence of 35% for those never breast-fed to 12% for those breast-fed for at least a year. This inverse relationship remained significant in the smaller sample for which maternal BMI data were available (n = 127), as each additional month of breast-feeding was associated with a 10% decreased odds ratio (OR) of overweight (adjusted OR = 0.90; 95% CI = 0.81, 0.99) after controlling for child's sex, current age, prematurity, birth-weight category, maternal education level, and maternal weight status.


CONCLUSIONS
This sample of children of Mexican-origin immigrant families had high rates of overweight at very young ages but also very high rates of breast-feeding. Duration of breast-feeding was strongly and inversely related with prevalence of overweight as a preschooler.
Kersey
Margaret
M
Division of General Pediatrics and Adolescent Health, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA. kerse003@umn.edu
Lipton
Rebecca
R
Sanchez-Rosado
Monica
M
Kumar
Jessica
J
Thisted
Ronald
R
Lantos
John D
JD
D001942:Breast Feeding / Q000208:ethnology*; D002675:Child, Preschool; D004641:Emigration and Immigration; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D017058:Mexican Americans; D050177:Overweight / Q000208:ethnology*; D018570:Risk Assessment