Mom's Sleep No Worse With Breastfeeding

Nov. 8, 2010— -- Mothers who breastfed their newborns did not appear to get less sleep than new moms who used formula or a combination of the breast milk and formula, researchers found.

A study of 80 new mothers found that neither objectively measured sleep nor the moms' perception of sleep quality differed based on feeding practices through the first 12 weeks of a baby's life, Hawley Montgomery-Downs, PhD, of West Virginia University in Morgantown, and colleagues reported online ahead of the December issue of Pediatrics.

These findings should ease the concerns of mothers who have heard that breastfed babies sleep less and wake up more often in the middle of the night, the researchers commented.

"Efforts to encourage women to breastfeed, as currently endorsed enthusiastically by the American Academy of Pediatrics, should include information about sleep," they wrote.

"Specifically, women should be told that a choice to formula feed does not necessarily equate with improved sleep," Montgomery-Downs and co-authors continued. "The risks of not breastfeeding should be weighed against the cumulative lack of evidence showing any benefit of formula feeding on maternal sleep."

To explore the common notion that women who breastfeed get less sleep, Montgomery-Downs and her colleagues recruited expectant women through childbirth classes, community ads, and word of mouth. A total of 80 new mothers were found eligible for the study and the team collected sleep data from the women through the first 12 weeks postpartum.

The researchers conducted their analysis in two-week increments, with the new moms divided into three groups -- those who exclusively breastfed, those who bottle fed only, and those who combined the two infant feeding methods.

The mothers wore a wrist actigraphy unit to objectively measure total sleep time, sleep efficiency, and sleep fragmentation, with data collected by a personal digital assistant (PDA). Subjective measures of sleep were also recorded in the PDA.

Of the objective sleep measures, there was only one significant between-group difference, which occurred on week 10 -- mothers who used a combination of breastfeeding and bottle feeding had better sleep efficiency compared with those who used formula feeding alone (P=0.021).