Saturday, March 26, 2011

Lactation Data Orgy

I really should be grading, but there is data to be graphed!

I use an electric breast milk pump to express milk for my baby while I am at work. I measure the amount of milk produced by each breast at each pumping, along with the time of day and time elapsed since I pumped or nursed last. The following graphs include total breast milk produced, and are posted for fun and for your critique/ interpretation. I am trying to find a pattern in order to further optimize my breast milk production, as I produce only about 1/3 to 1/2 of the milk my baby needs in a day.



Fig. 1
These are the results from two weeks of pumping, with an average of two pumping session per day. These data include both variable times between pumping sessions and variable pumping lengths. I wondered if there was a correlation between how long I pumped as to how much milk was expressed, hence


Fig. 2
It appears that pumping time is correlated with milk production. I then sought to keep pumping times constant at 20 minutes, for the next two weeks and explore whether milk production depended on time since last expression.


Fig. 3

Pumping was complete (as measured by no further increases in volume in last minute of pumping) nearly every session. More informative might be whether the rate of milk production varied with time between expression.


Fig. 4

The data are suggestive of a slight negative correlation, but the non-significance of a linear fit suggests that pumping rate is constant over varying expression intervals. Using this rate as a baseline, I intend to begin supplementing with More Milk Plus capsules and Mothers' Milk tea, two herbal remedies whose effectiveness has not been clearly documented in scientific studies (that I am aware of) to improve lactation. Nonetheless, these remedies are being recommended among laywomen as potent galactogogues. Results and comparison are expected to be posted on this blog in 2-4 weeks.

8 comments:

  1. fun! can't wait for the new data.

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  2. If you haven't read Jamie's post about milk supply and pumping I recommend it highly.

    http://mostgladly.typepad.com/cj/2007/09/its-my-party-an.html

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  3. You seem to have variations in variance in the dataset... :-)

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  4. You are definitely a scientist. How could you pass up such a willing participant for experimentation!

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  5. A few thoughts on the pumping thing (not that I have credentials besides having kids!)

    1. The only way I could make enough for my kids was to get up at 2 in the morning to pump every night once they started sleeping through. It sucked.

    2. Will Offspring, I rented a hospital-grade pump. With Bun, I bought a cheap one at the kids consignment store. The rented one extracted very significantly more milk (2x3 times as much)

    3. Bun was a HUGE baby and had big needs at first. Fenugreek worked for me. There's a ton of opinions on galactalogues, and again, not a qualified expert, but my anecdotal experience suggests it worked.

    4. Pumping while working sucks mightily. I'm glad it's over, and you have my sympathy!

    That's what I've got!

    MP

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  6. A friend of mine suggested pumping immediately after first feeding in the morning. After a while, your body gets used to the increased demand in the morning and starts producing more overnight. The other nice thing - you don't have to wait for letdown; since baby has already fed, milk is flowing. Takes a few weeks to get production up (and sometimes can be uncomfortable in the morning), but that allowed me to bank the extra from the morning and pump less at work.

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  7. I would consider plotting the data on a log-log scale. This might correct some of the heteroscedasticity mentioned by JaneB...

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  8. I used MoreMilk Special Blend. It's a tincture that you take with a little bit of juice and it helped increase milk production once nursing my daughter became more need based (vs. hormone driven in the first 3 months of her life). Good luck! I also did an extra pump before I went to sleep (another alternative to the 2am pump). Google "power pumping" it's a method to simulate a growth spurt in order to increase milk flow.

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