Association between duration of breastfeeding based on maternal reports and dorsal and ventral striatum and medial orbital gyrus volumes in early adolescence

• Published in: NeuroImage (Orlando, Fla.) Vol. 220; p. 117083
• Main Authors: Koshiyama, Daisuke, Okada, Naohiro, Ando, Shuntaro, Koike, Shinsuke, Yahata, Noriaki, Morita, Kentaro, Sawada, Kingo, Morita, Susumu, Kawakami, Shintaro, Kanata, Sho, Fujikawa, Shinya, Sugimoto, Noriko, Toriyama, Rie, Masaoka, Mio, Araki, Tsuyoshi, Kano, Yukiko, Endo, Kaori, Yamasaki, Syudo, Nishida, Atsushi, Hiraiwa-Hasegawa, Mariko, Kasai, Kiyoto
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Elsevier Inc 15-10-2020; Elsevier Limited; Elsevier
• Subjects: Adolescent; Adolescents; Breast Feeding; Breastfeeding; Breastfeeding & lactation; Child; Child development; Children & youth; Childrens health; Corpus Striatum - diagnostic imaging; Dorsal and ventral striatum; Emotional behavior; Female; Gray Matter - diagnostic imaging; Handbooks; Humans; Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; Investigations; Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Male; Maternal & child health; Maternal and child health handbook; Medial orbital gyrus; Morphometry; Neostriatum; Neuroimaging; Organ Size - physiology; Population; Population studies; Prefrontal Cortex - diagnostic imaging; Puberty; Questionnaires; Retrospective Studies; Substantia grisea; Teenagers; Time Factors; Voxel-based morphometry (VBM); United States > US; Japan; Emotional behavior; Medial orbital gyrus; Voxel-based morphometry (VBM); Breastfeeding; Maternal and child health handbook; Dorsal and ventral striatum
• ISSN: 1053-8119; 1095-9572
• DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.117083

Maternal breastfeeding has an impact on motor and emotional development in children of the next generation. Elucidating how breastfeeding during infancy affects brain regional structural development in early adolescence will be helpful for promoting healthy development. However, previous studies that have shown relationships between breastfeeding during infancy and cortical brain regions in adolescence are usually based on maternal retrospective recall of breastfeeding, and the accuracy of the data is unclear. In this study, we investigated the association between breastfeeding duration and brain regional volume in a population-neuroimaging study of early adolescents in Japan (N ​= ​207; 10.5–13.4 years) using voxel-based morphometry, which enabled us to analyze the whole brain. We evaluated breastfeeding duration as indexed by maternal and child health handbook records during infancy. The results showed a significant positive correlation between the duration of breastfeeding and gray matter volume in the dorsal and ventral striatum and the medial orbital gyrus. Post hoc exploratory analyses revealed that the duration of breastfeeding was significantly correlated with emotional behavior. Additionally, the volume in the medial orbital gyrus mediated an association between breastfeeding duration and emotional behavior. This is the first study to evaluate the effect of breastfeeding during infancy on regional brain volumes in early adolescence based on maternal and child health handbook records. Our findings shed light upon the importance of maternal breastfeeding for brain development related to emotional and motivational processing in early adolescence.