We already talked in Babies and more than one study that claimed that mothers who breastfeed their babies are less likely to develop rheumatoid arthritis than those who do not.
Now these conclusions are confirmed by a new study carried out by a team of researchers from Malmo University Hospital in Sweden.
It also states that the risk of suffering from the disease in mothers who breastfed their babies for 13 months or more was less than half than women who never did. Breastfeeding up to 12 months reduced the risk of contracting the disease by 25%.
These figures are very similar to those provided by the previous study. The researchers add that the data obtained suggest that the incidence of rheumatoid arthritis is inversely associated with long breastfeeding periods, and not with the number of children born as they have been thinking.
The Swedish team, in order to obtain their results, compared 136 women with rheumatoid arthritis and 544 women of similar age who did not suffer from the disease.
Rheumatoid arthritis is a chronic disease that causes inflammation of the surrounding joints and tissues, but that can also affect other organs and affects more women than men. There are still many gaps in terms of the factors that cause the disease, but research like these brings some light to it.
