LONDON, March 19 (Xinhua) -- Should your baby be fed according to a schedule or on demand? A new study suggests that demand-feeding is associated with higher IQ scores, but a casual link can not be decided so far.
Researchers at the University of Essex and University of Oxford reported that they investigated data of more than 10,000 children born in the early 1990s in the Bristol area in Britain.
The IQ scores of eight-year-old children who had been demand-fed as babies were between four and five points higher than the scores of schedule-fed children, says the study published in the European Journal of Public Health.
This difference is also evident in the results of tests at ages five, seven, 11 and 14 when the children were in school.
Lead researcher Maria Iacovou, at University of Essex, said: "The difference between schedule and demand-fed children is found both in breastfed and in bottle-fed babies."
"To give a sense of the kind of difference that four or five higher IQ points might make, in a class of 30 children, for example, a child who is right in the middle of the class, ranked at 15th, might be, with an improvement of four or five IQ points, ranked higher, at about 11th or 12th in the class."
However, she stressed that at this stage, it should be very cautious about claiming a casual link between feeding patterns and IQ.
"This is the first and only study of its kind, and further research is needed before we can say categorically that how you feed your baby has a long-term impact on his or her IQ and academic attainment, and before we can say definitively what the mechanisms are by which this relationship comes about," she added. Editor: yan