Are there harms from interventions to promote and support breastfeeding?
• What are the benefits and harms of breastfeeding on infant or child health outcomes? • What are the benefits and harms of breastfeeding on maternal health outcomes? The contextual questions regarding the effectiveness of health care system influences on interventions to promote breastfeeding and the potential benefits and harms related to such interventions can be answered by synthesizing the available scientific evidence for each key question. To avoid redundant work, a joint decision was made to adopt results from our earlier Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality evidence report4 to address questions 4 and 5 on the benefits and harms of breastfeeding for infants and mothers. Table 112-84 presents a synopsis of that report’s findings on questions 4 and 5. We address only questions 1 to 3 in this article. Specifically, we examine the effects of primary careinitiated interventions to support or promote breastfeeding on child and maternal health outcomes and breastfeeding rates, a
