two kinds of jaundice
There is breastfeeding jaundice which is really a result of a baby not feeding well in the first few days. "Jaundice in breastfed infants is the leading reason for hospital readmission of infants in the early weeks of life and often is associated with excessive weight loss and poor breastfeeding." JAUNDICE AND BREASTFEEDING Lawrence M. Gartner MD Pediatric Clinics of North America Volume 48 • Number 2 • April 2001 It usually occurs in those babies who had a traumatic birth ( vacuum, meconium aspiration, etc)which in itself will cause jaundice. These babies just don´t want to feed, and if you leave them alone, they will sleep for days. Once they used to tell the mom to stop breastfeeding and give a bottle for 24 hours, and voila, the jaundice would disappear or at least decrease........because the baby was getting food. If the mom had given that baby her milk in a spoon every few hours until he recovered from the birth, it would also have decreased the bilirubin levels, which are the indicators of jaundice. Usually, once the babies went back to breast, the levels rose again, but it was not a problem. That was in the 80´s. They wanted to make sure that the jaundice was not a result of some problem in the baby´s liver. What happened was that many babies would not return to the breast, and they realized that the danger of NOT breastfeeding was more dangerous than the jaundice, since breastfeeding is the best way to feed a human infant, and NOT breastfeeding can be dangerous. They stopped this practice. There is another kind of jaundice which is called breast milk jaundice. It usuall appears later on, and continues for weeks. It is thought that this is due to a factor in the milk, and there are even theories that this is healthy for the baby in some ways. " It has been suggested that this prolongation of physiologic jaundice in breastfed infants may provide protective effects for newborns by the antioxidant effects of bilirubin, compensating for the relative deficiency of endogenous antioxidants in newborns." (Gartner) Again, they used to stop breastfeeding to rule out liver dysfunction, but as above, this proved to be a problem, because many babies would not go back to the breast. Today, if anyone recommends you to stop breastfeeding they are practicing outdated medicine, because there are blood tests to check liver function, and the signs of liver dysfunction are very clear. By the way, in the US, they do not even pay attention to bilirubin levels under 20, while here they still put babies under bili lights at levels of 15.
