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IJE Advance Access published online on October 28, 2009
International Journal of Epidemiology, doi:10.1093/ije/dyp318
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Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Epidemiological Association © The Author 2009; all rights reserved.

Commentary: Assessing the impact of breastfeeding on child health: where conventional methods alone fall short for reliably establishing causal inference

Marie-Jo Brion

Department of Social Medicine, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 2BN, UK. E-mail: marie-jo.brion@bristol.ac.uk

Accepted 22 September 2009

The first 10% of the full text of this article appears below.

Given the strong social patterning of both breastfeeding and child health in high-income countries (HICs), there is a high probability of observing associations that are confounded by broader socio-economic factors rather than being due to any biological effects of breastfeeding. Even where extensive adjustments for confounders are made, residual confounding remains a persistant problem. As the exact nature of the relationship between socio-economic position (SEP) and health-related characteristics and disease are complex and not entirely understood, it is difficult to fully capture this in analyses and comprehensively control for confounding by SEP.1 As such, conventional observational methods, relying on the adjustment of associations for measured confounders, will likely be, on their . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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