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: Breast Milk
Famous quotes containing the words passing of, passing and/or unwanted:
“Beautiful glooms, soft dusks in the noon-day fire,—
Wildwood privacies, closets of lone desire,
Chamber from chamber parted with wavering arras of leaves,—
Cells for the passionate pleasure of prayer to the soul that grieves,
Pure with a sense of the passing of saints through the wood,
Cool for the dutiful weighing of ill with good;—”
—Sidney Lanier (1842–1881)
“It is the blankness that follows gaiety, and Everyman must depart
Out there into stranded night, for his destiny
Is to return unfruitful out of the lightness
That passing time evokes.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“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)