Multiparity Reveals the Blunting Effect of Breastfeeding on Physiological Reactivity to Psychological Stress
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Rat studies show that hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) responsiveness to physical and emotional stressors is attenuated during lactation, although situations evoking pup endangerment can supersede this phenomenon. In the human population, blunted cortisol responses are seen in primiparous breastfeeding compared to bottlefeeding mothers following physical stress, but not after psychosocial stress. It is currently unknown whether stressor salience (child-related versus nonrelated stressor) has a differential effect on cortisol reactivity as a function of infant feeding choice and whether HPA responses to stress could be modified by parity. We investigated the impact of infant feeding type and maternal parity on salivary cortisol and alpha-amylase response to stress in 5-20-week postpartum mothers using exposure to the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) and to an emotional film evoking threats to a child. Analyses show that alpha-amylase responses were similar in all groups and for both types of stress, suggesting that sympathetic reactivity was independent of infant feeding type and parity. By contrast, cortisol response was affected by these variables. In primiparous mothers, cortisol reactivity to psychological stressors did not vary as a function of infant feeding type while, among multiparous mothers, breastfeeding was associated with reduced responsiveness to the TSST and child-related stressor. We speculate that changes in neural mechanisms occurring as a result of pregnancy and lactation and that modulate the HPA axis in women might be exacerbated with multiple repeats of the pregnancy/lactation period. This would serve to 'desensitise' stress circuits and reduce the overall stress-induced cortisol secretion after multiple births.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it