PERSPECTIVE
Breast feeding
Communicating the benefits of breast feeding
MRC Epidemiology Unit, Cambridge, UK
Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
Dr Ken Ong
MRC Epidemiology Unit, Strangeways Research Laboratory, Worts Causeway, Cambridge CB1 8RN, UK; ken.ong@mrc-epid.cam.ac.uk
Perspective on the paper by Akobeng and Heller (see page483)
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
It is hopefully clear to readers of the Archives that exclusive breast feeding has several important health benefits and should be encouraged. But what is the best way to convey the extent of its benefits to an individual mother, or to a health care organisation deciding on the allocation of resources for health promotion?
Clinicians and research scientists are usually more familiar with, and tend to favour, measures of association such as relative risks (or odds ratios) and measures of impact such as the population attributable risk (PAR), which is the proportion of a disease that, assuming causality, could be avoided if that risk factor were removed. However, the size of a benefit, whether to the individual or to the population, is better measured in terms of actual risks or risk differences, because those measures also take into account the actual likelihood of the disease outcome. For example,
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