Most exclusively breastfed newborns lose weight during their first few days after birth, and until now, doctors and parents haven't had a way to know how much weight loss was normal or healthy. Indeed, most breastfeeding mothers worry if their babies are getting enough to eat during the first few days. For the first time, a new online tool is helping determine worrisome amounts of weight loss in breastfed newborns so they can get the interventions they need to be healthy. The tool could also give many new mothers the confidence to continue breastfeeding, the optimal form of feeding after birth.
The Newborn Weight Tool, or Newt, was developed by Dr. Ian Paul, a professor of pediatrics and public health sciences at Penn State College of Medicine and a pediatrician at Penn State Hershey Children’s Hospital, along with Eric Schaefer, a statistician at Penn State, and researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, and Kaiser Permanente. An interactive weight loss chart, Newt uses data collected from a diverse group of more than 100,000 exclusively breastfed babies born between 2009 and 2013 at Northern California Kaiser Permanente hospitals. The tool is available for free at www.newbornweight.org, and health care providers can bookmark it on their computers, smartphones and tablet devices. It was designed for health care professionals to share the information with parents similar to the way growth charts are used now.