As per a meta analysis published in a pregnancy spotlight issue of the Journal of the American Heart Association (JAHA), women who breastfed were less likely to develop heart disease or a stroke or have a death cause as cardiovascular disease when compared to women who did not breastfeed.

According to WHO, breastfeeding is linked with fewer respiratory infections and lower risk of death from infectious diseases among children who were breastfed. It also have maternal benefits like lower risk for Type 2 diabetes, ovarian cancer and breast cancer.

"Previous studies have investigated the association between breastfeeding and the risk of cardiovascular disease in the mother; however, the findings were inconsistent on the strength of the association and, specifically, the relationship between different durations of breastfeeding and cardiovascular disease risk. Therefore, it was important to systematically review the available literature and mathematically combine all of the evidence on this topic," said senior author Peter Willeit, M.D., M.Phil., Ph.D., professor of clinical epidemiology at the Medical University of Innsbruck in Innsbruck, Austria.

The health information was reviewed by the researchers from eight studies conducted during 1986 and 2006 in Australia, China, Norway, Japan and the U.S and one of them was multinational study.

The review included health records of nearly 1.2 million women and analyzed their relation between breastfeeding and the mother's individual cardiovascular risk.

Sources - Science Daily