Breastfeeding and allergies: time for a change in paradigm?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For decades, conventional wisdom and much medicalliterature have stated that breastfeeding, in addition toitsnutritionalandsociologicalbenefits,providedanumberofspecifichealthbenefitstotheinfant,includingreductionof the incidence of allergy and childhood wheezing. In2004,KempandKakakios[1]wrote‘Ithasbeenanarticleof faith amongst pediatricians and allergists that breast-feedingisbeneficialforthepreventionofallergicdisease’.Now that paradigm is beingchallenged, as several studiespublished over the last few years suggest, there is nosustained protective effect, or even, that there is anincreased long-term risk of allergy and asthma associatedwith breastfeeding. These reports contrast with studiesdemonstratingreductionofchildhoodwheezingandaller-gic diseases among breastfed children, leading to contro-versy and debate [2,3]. A recent editorial in the BritishMedical Journal concluded ‘...the claim that breastfeed-ingreducestheriskofallergyandasthmaisnotsupportedby evidence’ [4 ]. This review examines reasons for theconflicting reports and suggests an over-arching perspect-ive given recent evidence.Breastfeeding is a natural phenomenon, providingbalanced nutrition and mother–infant bonding, as wellas a number of health benefits. These include reducedincidence of infectious diseases, including diarrheal dis-eases and lower respiratory tract infections, reducedincidence of diabetes and obesity, and improved mentalperformance [5,6]. There are numerous reasons whybreastfeeding should be encouraged wherever possible,with few exceptions such as in the presence of maternalHIV infection [7].
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".