• Edwards CN
• Miller J

• Affiliation / AECC University College
• Affiliation(G) / England / Bournemouth
• Breast Feeding
• Infant
• Open Access Document
• Review Literature as Topic

Breastfeeding is regarded as the optimal method of neonatal and infant nutrition, with short and long term benefits for both infant and mother.  Every country in the world fails to meet recommended breastfeeding standards. Therefore, the identification and resolution of factors that contribute to sub-optimal feeding is vital in order to improve breastfeeding continuation. While the majority of interventions addressing sub-optimal breastfeeding focus on the mother, chiropractors have addressed biomechanical dysfunctions in the infant.  The aim of this review was to investigate the impact of chiropractic care on the continuation of breastfeeding to determine whether there was sufficient evidence to under-pin a randomized trial.

The authors describe the literature search and summarize the findings and study designs reported in articles that met inclusion criteria. Evidence
of benefit for chiropractic care for the breastfeeding dyad exists only at low-to-moderate-level. Randomized trials must be done because there is a
lack of high-level evidence available on the effects of chiropractic intervention, a situation partly due to the ethical issue of assigning infants with suboptimal breastfeeding into a high level randomized controlled trial where some children would be allocated to a non-treatment group.

Author affiliations: AECC University College, Bournemouth, England

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