[Breast feeding. The importance of correct management]

The advantages that breast-feeding still offers over bottle-feeding are widely recognized. This study has the following aims: 1) to verify how many of the women that delivered during the last biennium at the Midwifery School of Camerino breastfed their infants for a fair amount of time; 2) to evaluate the relationship between the results obtained and the protocols followed in the management of the various issues connected with breast-feeding. The research was carried out into a sample of 140 women, randomly selected. The anamnestic and clinical data obtained from the medical cards were integrated with information gathered by telephonic interviews. Less than 40% of the women of the sample gave their infants only maternal milk for a very good period. The inobservance of many WHO guidelines for the promotion of breast-feeding seems to be the main cause of the disappointing results obtained. Some groups of women proved more exposed to the risk of inadequate suckling: teenagers, the older gravidae, women that delivered prematurely, those that had children with a low birth weight, the women that had previous breast-feeding failures, smokers, women that attended a course of psychoprophylaxis, women with the lowest socioeconomic standards, mothers that were precociously separated from their babies, women that had some gestational pathology or some problems during the first days after delivery, women that had as main reference doctors without a proper breast-feeding culture.