Breast-fed low birth weight premature infants: A description of nutritional intake in the first six months of life

Caring for low-birth-weight (LBW) premature infants has remained an enormous challenge to health care professionals during the last 3 decades. The struggle to preserve these precious lives impacts nursing as well as the entire community. In 2003 to 2004, over 8% of the pregnancies in the United States resulted in the delivery of LBW babies. The percentage of infants born LBW has risen 16 percent since 1990. The rate of preterm-birth infants (delivered at less than 37 weeks gestation) is 12.5% or 1 of every 8 infants. In the United States, one half million infants were born preterm in 2004. The survival, growth, and development of these infants are precarious and accompanied by significant morbidity. In 2002, LBW and prematurity were the second leading cause of death for all infants, accounting for 16.6% of total infant mortality. More recently, in the period from 1990 to 2001, infant mortality has been 6.8 per 1000. Low-birth-weight premature infants exhibit a broad range of health problems, including growth and developmental delays, learning disabilities, poor postnatal growth, cognitive and behavior problems, cerebral palsy, and poor performance on developmental measures as compared to the performances of normal term birth weight infants. These infants present with a wide variety of nutritional, growth, and developmental issues during the course of their neonatal stabilization to their infancy. The nutritional, growth, and developmental issues continue well into the first year of life. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) Committee on Nutrition recommends breastfeeding as the optimal content and method of infant feeding for LBW premature infants in the first year of life. The AAP's position statement is based on a substantial body of research that indicates numerous nutritional, immunologic, and physiological