Photo: Miguel Sanz/Getty
New research suggests that people are more likely to become left-handed or ambidextrous in adolescence and adulthood if they are fed from a bottle as an infant.
The findings, extracted from a study conducted at the University of Washington that was published last month in the scientific journalLaterality: Asymmetries of Body, Brain and Cognition, were based on a group of 60,000 pairs of mothers and children who breastfed or bottle-fed their babies.
Specifically, the study found that babies who breastfed for one month had a 9 percent lower chance of being non-right-handed, while one to six months showed a decrease of 15 percent and more than six months had a 22 percent lower chance of “nonrighthandedness.”
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According toScience Daily, the author of the study — Philippe Hujoel, an adjunct professor of epidemiology at UW’s School of Public Health and professor at its School of Dentistry — said, “We think breastfeeding optimizes the process the brain undergoes when solidifying handedness.”
The conclusion also shed light on how long a mother would need to breastfeed before it had any kind of lastingimpact on the brain’s developmentin terms of whether a child would be right-handed or not — with over six months, as mentioned previously, having the largest impact.
“It provides an independent line of evidence that breastfeeding may need to last six to nine months,” Hujoel explained of the findings, according toScience Daily. (However, “Breastfeeding infants after nine months was no longer associated with further reductions in the prevalence of nonrighthandedness,” thestudy concluded in part.)
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Hujoel clarified, according toScience Daily, that the method of feeding only suggests an in-part link between itself and handedness, while much of the latteris determined early in the fetal stage.
Instead, feeding may influence handedness during brain lateralization — a later processScience Dailydescribes as “when the region of the brain that controls handedness localizes to one side of the brain.”
source: people.com
