[Breastfeeding. Conditioning factors]

To know the prevalence of maternal breastfeeding over distinctive ages of a child's life, in our ward, and to analyze the factors which bear an influence on its start, duration and stop.

In our study, we included 549 newborns who were born in and released in good health from the Palamos Hospital between March 1999 and March 2000. We carried out telephone surveys upon release from the hospital and at ages of one, three and six months. We compiled 82 variable which we processed and analyzed on Microsoft Excel. We defined the value p < 0.05 as statistically significant.

90.71% of newborns breastfed upon hospital release, 78.4% at one month, 58.28% at three months, and 32.8% at six months; of the latter, 53.6% belonged to immigrant families and 29.3% to European families. 54.43% of mothers from the European families studied attended Maternal Education. 83.13% of mothers who breastfed their babies had made their decision to do so before conceiving their child.

We consider the rate of breastfeeding mothers to be satisfactory. Its prevalence progressively decreases as the child gets older without any important changes in any period. These are factors related to a higher rate of breast-feeding: immigrant families, full term pregnancy, low educational level, Maternal Education attendance, first births, decision to breastfeed made before conception, not giving any supplements, perception of milk production before hospital release and no to use nipple-shields nor pacifiers. Hypogalactia and mothers return to work are the main reasons for stopping breastfeeding.