Many mothers I know, myself included, tried the "relief bottle" strategy to occasionally get a little more sleep at night.
A relief bottle is a bottle of breastmilk given to the baby at night by someone else other than the mother. The mother pumps earlier in the day, and sets aside the milk for a nighttime feeding.
For some families it works well. For some it doesn't, often because some mothers find it difficult to skip a feeding without becoming uncomfortably engorged.
A new study is raising questions (at least in the press) about whether it's wise to give a baby milk made during the day at night. Researchers in Spain have found that breastmilk produced at night has higher concentrations of sleep-inducing nucleotides than milk produced during the day.
This discovery of sleep-inducing components in nighttime milk would confirm what most mothers of infants (past the newborn stage) tell me about nighttime breastfeedings: their babies are "all business" when they feed at night, generally eating and then falling deeply asleep without any alert or fussy time.
So, does it make sense to give a relief bottle with milk pumped earlier in the day?
My personal opinion is that if it's working for you and your baby, why not continue? And if it seems to result in a baby who sleeps poorly, you've probably stopped anyway.
There is, though, one suggestion about this research which I find disturbing:
Since previous studies have also hinted that bottle-fed infants have more problems sleeping through the night, Sánchez's colleague, Javier Cubero, has been investigating whether sleep-inducing nucleotides could be added to formula milk.
In a separate study, Sánchez and Cubero created a "night-time" milk by adding 5'AMP and 5'UMP to standard formula milk. Infants receiving this milk between 6 pm and 6 am, and normal milk during the day, fell asleep faster and spent longer sleeping than when they drank standard formula milk all the time.
Many researchers believe that babies' natural tendency to wake during the night is protective against SIDS. Dr. Sears says, "Breastfed babies sleep less soundly than artificially fed infants and are more likely to sleep with their mothers; thus, they may be more easily aroused when they experience a stop-breathing episode." As I wrote earlier, at least one formula company is already producing and marketing a 'nighttime formula."
How about you? Did you do a relief bottle, and did it work?
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