PROBIT
III
This study is based on the follow-up 17,046 healthy infants who participated in the Promotion of Breastfeeding Intervention Trial (PROBIT, Professor Michael Kramer, Principal Investigator, McGill University), a cluster-randomised trial in the Republic of Belarus of a breastfeeding health-promotion intervention, designed to increase rates and duration of exclusive breastfeeding.
The intervention produced two randomised cohorts with substantially different exposure to breastfeeding, providing a unique opportunity to test, in an intention to treat analysis, the affects of breastfeeding on CHD risk factors.
Data collection has just been completed to investigate associations of breastfeeding in infancy with atopic disease, cognitive development, behaviour, growth, obesity, and blood pressure (PROBIT II, Professor Michael Kramer, Principal Investigator, McGill University).
In this study (PROBIT III), we plan to examine whether the experimental breastfeeding promotion intervention introduced in Belarus in 1996/97 has effects at 11 years of age on coronary heart disease risk factors and the insulin-like growth factor axis.
The investigators are:- Professor Michael Kramer, McGill University; Dr Matthew Gillman, Harvard University; Dr Ying Foo; Professor George Davey Smith and Dr Richard Martin, University of Bristol. The Bristol based study coordinator is Rita Patel.
We are indebted to our collaborators in Belarus based in the National Research and Applied Medicine Centre 'Mother and Child', Minsk and all the pediatricians involved in this study; the Department of Maternal and Child Health at the Ministry of Health in Minsk, who have collaborated in all 3 phases of PROBIT and all the children and parents who have made this study possible.
