Early, regular breast-milk pumping may lead to early breast-milk feeding cessation.

Objective: To estimate the effect of early, regular breast-milk pumping on time to breast-milk feeding (BMF) and exclusive BMF cessation, for working and non-working women. Design: Using the Infant Feeding Practices Survey II (IFPS II), we estimated weighted hazard ratios (HR) for the effect of regular pumping (participant defined) compared with non-regular/not pumping, reported at month 2, on both time to BMF cessation (to 12 months) and time to exclusive BMF cessation (to 6 months), using inverse probability weights to control confounding. Setting: USA, 2005-2007. Subjects: BMF (n 1624) and exclusively BMF (n 971) IFPS II participants at month 2. Results: The weighted HR for time to BMF cessation was 1.62 (95% CI 1.47, 1.78) and for time to exclusive BMF cessation was 1.14 (95% CI 1.03, 1.25). Among non-working women, the weighted HR for time to BMF cessation was 2.05 (95% CI 1.84, 2.28) and for time to exclusive BMF cessation was 1.10 (95% CI 0.98, 1.22). Among working women, the weighted HR for time to BMF cessation was 0.90 (95% CI 0.75, 1.07) and for time to exclusive BMF cessation was 1.14 (95% CI 0.96, 1.36). Conclusions: Overall, regular pumpers were more likely to stop BMF and exclusive BMF than non-regular/non-pumpers. Non-working regular pumpers were more likely than non-regular/non-pumpers to stop BMF. There was no effect among working women. Early, regular pumpers may need specialized support to maintain BMF.