Passing of Unwanted Substances
Despite the risk of substances transmitting from the mother to the child through breast milk, breastfeeding has far more advantages than infant formulas, and, with few exceptions, the WHO recommends exclusive breastfeeding for the first 6 months of life.
The milk-producing cells are most permeable to drugs during the first postpartum week.
Drug characteristics that increase excretion in milk include:
- Not plasma protein binding
- Non-ionized
- Low molecular weight
- Lipid solubility rather than water solubility
- Weakly alkaline rather than weak acid
Drugs are transferred from blood plasma across ductal cells to the milk by diffusion or active transport. The latter may result in higher concentration of the drug in the breast milk than in the plasma of the mother.
The amounts of most drugs in milk do not exceed 2% of the total ingested dose.
Read more about this topic: Human Breast Milk
Famous quotes containing the words passing and/or unwanted:
“We all end up living secret lives. We create what we are willing to admire and admiring what we shouldn’t confess to the secret of our own sin, our own insufficiency, our own sadness. We all end up taking our secrets into the world and handing them over to strangers, only to realize it’s often too late to claim them back. The very nature of time passing is sad beyond words. Memories mean they’re gone.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)
“It is like any other work of art.
It is and never can be changed.
Behind everything there is always
The unknown unwanted life.”
—Randall Jarrell (1914–1965)