Arthritis, sleep apnea, and...laughter?

There have been a bunch of studies released on breastfeeding recently, and I'm just now catching up. 

First, a study from Sweden showing that breastfeeding for 13 months reduces mothers' risk of developing rheumatoid arthritis.  This connection has been made before, in a study showing that breastfeeding for a total of 24 months (this could be spread out among multiple babies), reduced the risk of rheumatoid arthritis by half.

Next, a study from West Virginia University is one of the first to draw a connection between breastfeeding and sleep-related breathing disorders.  The study found that who were breastfed for at least two months as infants "had lower rates and less severe measures of an sleep-related breathing disorder, and that breast feeding beyond two months provided additional benefits for reduced disorder severity."  If you're interested in this topic, check out the website of Brian Palmer, DDS, a dentist and breastfeeding advocate who has been arguing for some time that this connection exists.

And here's the strange one.  I can't imagine how anyone would even come up with this idea to study.  Researchers in Japan found a connection between a mother's laughter prior to a feeding and symptoms of excema:

Some of the mothers were shown either a Charlie Chaplin movie or boring footage about weather, and their breast milk was taken for testing at regular intervals.

Two milk feeds later, the infants were tested for their reaction to dust mites and latex -- and those whose mothers had laughed had "markedly reduced reactions," the British science weekly says.

The key may lie in melatonin, a hormone associated with relaxation, and whose levels are typically low among people with eczema. The laughing mothers had higher levels of melatonin in their breastmilk.

I'm not even sure what to say about this one, except to remind us that you don't have to be happy to breastfeed.  If that were the case, our species would have died out a long time ago.

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