Breastfeeding

Feeding a baby with milk from the mother's breast, usually directly from the breast. MedlinePlus says breastfeeding offers many benefits to the baby and may also help the mother's health, and advises mothers without health problems to try to give breast milk for at least the first six months. Help is available from lactation consultants, and the support itself has been studied.

Care topic
In this atlas

Overview

Technical summary

A hub for lactation records in this atlas. MedlinePlus and the NIH describe benefits and common questions. Evidence and guidance recorded here: the 2025 US recommendation on counselling to support breastfeeding; the 2017 guideline on support in maternity facilities (Recommendation 1 asks that early and uninterrupted skin-to-skin contact be facilitated and encouraged as soon as possible after birth); the Baby-friendly Hospital Initiative; a large breastfeeding promotion trial in Belarus; and the MedlinePlus and NIH safe sleep pages, which list feeding human milk among the steps that lower the risk of SIDS. The recipient is mother and infant; claims keep the two apart. Pages in this atlas on donor milk for very low birth weight infants, breast pumps, mastitis and the international marketing code for breast-milk substitutes sit under this hub. Breastfeeding with specific medicines or illnesses is not covered.

Scope

Starting and continuing breastfeeding, support for it, and the evidence recorded for that support. Pages on donor milk, breast pumps, mastitis and the marketing code for breast-milk substitutes link to this hub.

Life stages: Postpartum
Newborn
Infant follow-up
Care setting: Home, community and facilities providing maternity and newborn services.

Claims and evidence

No claims are published for this care topic yet.

Clinical links

Each link reports what one cited claim says about one population. "Evaluated for" means studied, not shown to work. These links do not show that anything is effective or right for you.

Claim, not a settled fact Recommended for this: Breastfeeding support and counselling (Recommended for, seen from the other side)
Applies to Mixed recipients
- Adolescents and adults who are pregnant or postpartum, and their infants and children. The counselling and referral is given to the pregnant or postpartum person in primary care; the benefits the USPSTF weighed include benefits to infants and children.
- Primary care (named in the statement title).
- United States (USPSTF recommendation statement)
- Pregnancy and after birth
- Gestational age Not reported
- Postnatal age Not reported
Follow-up Not applicable (recommendation context)
In 2025 the US Preventive Services Task Force recommended providing interventions or referrals, during pregnancy and after birth, to support breastfeeding (B recommendation). It concluded with moderate certainty that primary care behavioral counselling interventions to support breastfeeding have a moderate net benefit. The statement covers adolescents and adults who are pregnant or postpartum, and their infants and children.
Limitations. Only the PubMed abstract of the JAMA statement was read. The USPSTF grade and its certainty wording are the Task Force's own and are not a GRADE rating, so the certainty field is left not assessed. An earlier USPSTF statement on primary care interventions to support breastfeeding (JAMA 2016, PMID 27784102) also carries a B recommendation; the 2025 abstract read does not say that it replaces the 2016 statement, so no supersession link is recorded. The abstract does not describe which counselling methods were tested. The recommendation is not advice for any individual.
Claim, not a settled fact Recommended for this: Breastfeeding support and counselling (Recommended for, seen from the other side)
Applies to Mixed recipients
- Women delivering in hospitals, maternity facilities or other facilities providing maternity and newborn services, and their infants. WHO says this includes mother-infant pairs with term infants, as well as those with preterm, low-birth-weight or sick infants and those admitted to neonatal intensive care units.
- Facilities providing maternity and newborn services.
- Global (WHO guideline for use in national and facility programmes)
- Childbirth and the early postpartum and newborn period, during the stay at the facility
- Gestational age Not reported
- Postnatal age Not reported
Follow-up Not applicable (recommendation context)
In its 2017 guideline on protecting, promoting and supporting breastfeeding in facilities providing maternity and newborn services, WHO recommends that mothers receive practical support to enable them to start and establish breastfeeding and to manage common breastfeeding difficulties (Recommendation 3). WHO labels it recommended, based on moderate-quality evidence. The guideline updates and supersedes the 1989 Ten Steps to Successful Breastfeeding.
Limitations. WHO uses three types of recommendation (recommended, context-specific recommendation, not recommended) and grades the quality of evidence for each recommendation as high, moderate, low or very low. The moderate-quality rating is the guideline's own and applies to this recommendation, so it is recorded as the certainty with that method. Only the recommendation list and the methods paragraphs were read, not the evidence tables. The guideline is for facility programmes and national policy, not advice for any individual. Whether a later edition replaces it was not checked.
Claim, not a settled fact Evaluated for this: Breastfeeding support and counselling (Evaluated for, seen from the other side)
Applies to Mixed recipients
- Mother-infant pairs: full-term singleton infants weighing at least 2500 g and their healthy mothers who intended to breastfeed. 17046 pairs were enrolled and 16491 (96.7%) completed the 12 months of follow-up. Sites, not individuals, were randomized.
- 31 maternity hospitals and polyclinics, randomized as clusters: 16 to the experimental intervention and 15 to continuing usual infant feeding practices.
- Republic of Belarus
- Newborns at birth, followed for the first 12 months of life
- Gestational age Not reported
- Postnatal age Not reported
Follow-up Cluster-randomized trial conducted June 1996 to December 1997 with 1-year follow-up.
In PROBIT, a cluster-randomized trial in 31 maternity hospitals and polyclinics in Belarus, 16 sites received an intervention modelled on the Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative and 15 continued usual infant feeding practices; 17046 mother-infant pairs took part and 16491 completed 12 months of follow-up. Infants at the intervention sites were more likely than control infants to be breastfed to any degree at 12 months (19.7% against 11.4%) and more likely to be exclusively breastfed at 3 months (43.3% against 6.4%, P<.001) and at 6 months (7.9% against 0.6%, P=.01).
Limitations. Only the PubMed abstract was read. The abstract prints an adjusted odds ratio of 0.47 (95% CI 0.32 to 0.69) next to the 12-month figures without saying what it compares, so this record does not interpret it. The registry lists no masking (masking NONE), and breastfeeding was reported by the study population, which can make the measure less exact. The intervention was modelled on the WHO and UNICEF initiative; the trial does not show how much any one part of it contributed. The trial ran from June 1996 to December 1997 in one country with a different health system from many others, so results may not carry over.